Managing too much Mail?

Question

I have in excess of 3500 mail messages in the in box (three months!) and that is with shifting to other folders and deleting. Most of these are records that need to be kept and be able to be accessed easily at some date in the future. The sent mail is above 4000! I have been backing up but being able to find and view this back up version seems to be difficult with the swapping of folders around so it can be viewed in mail. Is there anyone who has worked out how to manage this situation and can give me a few pointers?

Answer 1

I had more than 10k messages on my Mac at work. I can tell you one thing: move them out of your inbox and sent-items to different folders. I had folders for private mail, mail lists and every client (which included per-project subfolders). To make sorting easier I made 30 or 40 rules and actively used smart folders for unsorted/unread mail. The Junk filter also helps a lot. Rebuild those mailboxes regularly which you often move messages from.
In fact, Mail in Tiger keeps every message in a separate file, which makes browsing huge mailboxes faster. Besides, if things go wrong you lose 1 corrupted message instead of hundreds like before.