I use Yahoo email. Yahoo is not structured for subfolders. I could not justify adding 30 to 35 email folders, one for each woman that I interviewed on the Camino. I, therefore, had all my emails with these women, sent and received, in one folder entitled Camino Interviews. Since I have had at least three to five correspondences with each interviewee, it has become increasing difficult to manage the correspondences or to find a specific email. To add to the confusion, when I move an email from the Sent folder to the Camino Interviews folder, Yahoo replaces the name in the “Sent to” column with my name, making it impossible to recognize the email.
When I structured my documents folder for Women of the Way, I created a subfolder for each woman that I interviewed. Today, in each of these folders I created an “Email” subfolder and then printed a PDF of each email and filed it appropriately.
Now I feel better-organized and able to find a specific email. Though this exercise took several hours, it will save me hours of searching. Maintaining this filing method only requires printing a PDF and then saving the PDF into the correct document folder.
