If there’s one thing I’ve learned from operating a one-man shop from my home office, it’s that I need to have the same business tools that the big boys use. Consumers and SOHO users like myself tend to think that they don’t really need an email archiving solution. We just keep all our emails in our inbox, or maybe make some additional folders for specific categories. Foldering might work for a while, but it does get tedious. Once you’ve been in business for a while, and you start having to sort through enormous quantities of email, sorting those emails into folders for storage and future reference just takes up too much time.

And then what about finding them? And yes, I’m guilty. I admit it. I’m like the cobbler who has holes in his shoes. My email client has dozens of folders, and I spend too much time sorting them out. And when I need to find an email from six months or a year ago, it doesn’t really help much. It still takes way too much time to find it. if you rely on your emails for business, it definitely helps to have a search utility to quickly retrieve an email based on content or a keyword phrase.

Foldering harkens back to the days of file cabinets, and yes, I have four physical file cabinets with two drawers each in my home office, too. We file papers in folders labeled by category, by client, or alphabetically, and this too, can take up way too much time. But is the file cabinet metaphor still useful for email today? Not so much. Email folders are only scalable up to the point where your eyeballs start to bulge out and all the folders start to blur together when you go to manage your email every morning.

Few people even realize that Windows Mail, which is the client I use, does have a search utility for searching emails. Although it’s not as full-featured as a third-party archiving solution, it’s a start–and I think I’m going to abandon all that time-consuming folder sorting from now on.