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A comment on There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk. Parent comment

Re:There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderl... by johngalt on Friday October 21, 2016 @12:38PM (#12761900)
The first time I saw this I was floored. After seeing it a few times, I was curious: "what establishes this pattern?", "how do people arrive at thinking of the trash folder as an archive?"

In most cases they are using the delete key something like a surrogate for the read/unread flag. Keeping the inbox 'clean' of old email. I tried testing with view filters set to only show unread email, but that didn't work because the read flag is toggled too easily. Effectively they want a button that says "I'm done with you go away" to an email in their inbox.

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Re:There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderl... by krylon on Saturday October 22, 2016 @02:48AM (#12767570)
That makes sense. Except for that one guy who had subfolders in his Trash folder. ;-) I tried to explain him that Outlook supports archiving mails and can even do so automatically, but he - like most of us - is a creature of habit, and I quickly stopped.

All in all, if it works for these users, I am not going to impose my style of organizing my mailbox on them. But using the Trash for that purpose seems dangerous for the same reason using the trash bin in the office as an archive is.

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