Managing your project email

[Nancy Allison]

When I've been on a long project, say, repeatedly revising the same
documentation over a period of several years, I am loathe to delete the
email messages about that project. You never know what will turn out to be
useful after a project has taken a few twists and turns.

I use Outlook, and I use a rule to store all email in a project folder. I
also use the archive feature. But, these tools give me huge folders of
messages, that's about it. I can use the Search feature -- but the
terminology AND senders are often the same over the course of a long
project, and there's little that can specialize a search enough to provide
only good hits.

I am currently investigating if I can assign Categories to incoming mail,
and that may be a solution. But I'm still not crazy about the huge grab-bags
of messages.

Do any of you use second-party tools for managing your email? How about a
tool that converts large batches of emails to editable text files -- that's
file*s*, not one lengthy file of all messages in a directory. I've managed
*that* result for myself . . . 

Also, having converted the email to text files in a regular directory, is
there a way to keep attached documents stored with their text message files?
Occasionally, someone will say, "I sent you the version that contained that
information" -- and over the course of a project you've received multiple
versions of the same document from various people, stored them in your
project directory, and now you can't find the version that that particular
person sent you, without digging through your monstrous Outlook directory
or, even worse, your archive.

Do you feel my pain?

--Nancy