While you won’t find a bigger Google fanboy than me, I have to say that the trend of new uber-search tools * Desktop etc, and “tagging” and “folksonomies” are, in my opinion, a fad. A lot of people will use a good indexed search tool over hierarchies, but I think that once the field clears (it’s something I’m kinda watching closely), people will go back to a heirarchical tree of some kind, and use an index as a complement to it.

This is what I’ve done with my email. I used to do several levels deep of folders when filing email. It’s become cumbersome, and very difficult to find stuff. Several months ago, I found an excellent Outlook plugin called Lookout (google it if you use OL, great great tool). It indexes stuff as the current bevy of search tools do, but it’s mostly but not entirely, limited to your Outlook data store. Anyway…after using it for a bit, I found that while it’s incredibly useful and much better than OL’s built-in search features in most cases, I still had to put my freaking email somewhere. Leaving them in the inbox is messy. Putting them in a single monolithic folder is…not right. So instead of the 3-5 level deep folders I used to use, now it’s more like 1-2 levels.

What do you do with your email?