We ended last week talking about organizing your email by creating mailboxes and developing a filing system for messages you wish to save.  For example, you might create a discrete mailbox for all messages from a particular sender or pertaining to common subject matter.  Email applications can further assist your organizational efforts by automatically moving incoming email to a given mailbox based on sender, subject matter, etc.

This week let’s look at one easy way to keep your email application from becoming bloated.  If you’re a “casual” emailer it may take some time to build up bloat.  If you’re a “professional” emailer (even though the subject matter could be urban legends, rumors, and gossip instead of business meeting notes), your email application will soon be working overtime to keep up.

How can you head off bloat at the pass?  Be an “email miner”.  A what?  You heard me.  A miner.  What does that mean?  A miner digging for precious ore doesn’t keep all the worthless dirt surrounding the valuable nuggets.  You should do the same with incoming email messages.

Here’s an example.  You receive an email message from a businessperson inviting you to a meeting next week.  Within the message is their email address, telephone number, business mailing address, and details of the time and place of the meeting.

What nuggets of information can you mine out of this message?  You can easily (especially if you’re a Mac user) use Apple Mail’s data detector feature to put their contact information into your Address Book and the meeting information into iCal.  You can even select the meeting address and Address Book will find the location in Google Maps.

If you’re using a less advanced email application, you can copy and paste the information into your contact manager and calendar.  The point is: don’t use your email application as an address book or calendar - you have dedicated applications better suited to those functions.

Once you’ve mined the message – delete it.  While we’re on the subject of deleting, remember that many applications place an email message in the “Trash” the first time you select and delete it.  You’ll need to remember to empty the Trash occasionally.

What other things can we mine out of an email message?  You got it – attachments.  Let’s look at a classic example: a message with photos attached.  I’m not talking about cute photos of cats and dogs napping together or “half Hil, half Bill” portraits.  I’m talking about children, grandchildren, parents – you know, the important stuff.  Where’s the best place to keep keepsake photos?  In iPhoto.  Get them out of your email.  Then, once you’ve moved the photos to iPhoto, delete the message.  Boom.  Saved space.  It’s a wonderful thing.

While we’re on the subject of photos, what about those email messages you sent to others with photos of your kids attached?  Chances are your email application is set to keep a copy of your outgoing messages.  Are those photos still attached to messages in your “Sent” folder?  You bet.  Do they need to be there, considering they’re stored elsewhere (in original resolution) in their rightful place (iPhoto)?  No.

Now, I’m not suggesting you categorically change your email application’s preferences to never save your sent email messages.  There are certainly advantages to having a record of what you’ve sent.  But you don’t need to keep a copy of photos in messages in your “Sent” folder.

So, how do you delete attachments from email messages whose text you want to keep?  In Apple Mail, simply select the message(s), go to the “Message” menu, and select “Remove Attachments”.

Next time:  saving important (and not so important) email for posterity.