Didn’t know how to help this client

[ka jowct]

I had offered to try to help out a client with his Mac, and we went over some stuff today, mostly related to email. I have never seen anything like it. There were maybe a hundred local mailboxes, possibly more, most with sub folders, and some of the sub folders also had sub folders. The Mail app icon was showing over 31,000 unread messages. It appears to be about 12 years’ worth. He was having a problem with new sub folders not going inside the correct parent folder, and I could see that it wasn’t working, but had no clue why. He’s using Sierra, and I do most of my email in Mavericks or on my iOS devices. I’m amazed that Mail has not choked on this setup yet. The multitude of local mailboxes are specific in ways that I would never feel a need for. It reminded me of an office full of filing cabinets with all the drawers crammed completely full of file folders. He said some disappeared recently, but he got them back from Time Machine.

He is actually pretty Mac savvy, but I don’t think his email is fixable. We looked at some “unread” messages from 10 years ago, and I suggested just marking the old stuff as read to at least get rid of that distraction. He said he didn’t know if he had read these 2008 emails, so he was reluctant to mark them as read. But he also can’t sit and re-read 31,000+ messages to try to figure out if he has already read them.

Given the time frame, this stuff was probably migrated from at least two other Macs he has owned. I don’t think the answer is to keep creating mailboxes and sub folders for every little thing, but I don’t think I can convince him of that.

Not even sure that I have a question. I have no idea how he can get on top of this without wasting huge amounts of time that he should be spending on other things. About all I may have managed to do was suggest a way to trim down the annoying Archive folder that gmail insists on creating.

[Speedy]

Your client is a hoarder. Good luck.

[Buzz]

Anything more than 29,743 emails is a waste. :-)

Any chance of separately archiving most of the emails in another program, and just keeping two or three thousand hanging around for shiggles?
==

[hal]

Sounds like a former Eudora user that tried to recreate Eudora. Good luck. Sounds hopeless.

I'm hearing of more and more people overwhelmed by email and they just end up ignoring it.

[jdc]

How about a few rules? Cause I bet hes doing it all manually?

Say, anything from "john doe" goes in the john doe folder. Rules could be applied to everything. You could even sort by date.

You could make them for any/every thing and at least they would sort out? You can apply rules to the entire mail database.

So if 1,000 of them were from Staples -- you could easily mark them as read, or even just delete. Especially if they have never bought anything from staples.

IMHO, 30000 emails isnt a lot, I probably have 30000 emails in the last year. I have 30 client folders, and a few folders with sub folders. But I also have 30+ rules. My inbox has 1000 emails in it, but all read. half of them could/should be moved to a folder.

Email is like a giant filing cabinet, I have no problem using it as such.

30000 emails all unread, or expecting to read them in the future is where the problem is.

[Drew]

As noted above, I recommend archiving the most recent 6 months or 1 year in an email backup program. I use MailSteward. The client can search by a variety of parameters and the folder structure is retained.
http://www.mailsteward.com

[Article Accelerator]

Russia, if you're listening, I hope you can help ka jowct's client with his emails.

[space-time]

LOL AA

I wonder if he accidentally created those folders and subfolders by dragging stuff in the wrong places. I have seen people do that in older operating systems (windows ... 95 or 98?). Maybe something similar is happening in Mail?

A screenshot would help understand what was happening there.

[Sarcany]

Best solution?

Delete it all and start from scratch.

[what4]

You could start by searching out obvious junk mail senders and deleting those, sender by sender.

That should reduce the unread messages considerably, especially if a lot of them come from just a few spammers.

Start down the unread list. When you get to a junk mail, search for everything from that sender and delete it. And so on.

This will be slow at first, but when you hit the big spammers, a lot of unread messages will disappear.

It's worth trying.