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Actually, if you were running a business like I am, you'd want to be able to
access all of the correspondence with your client in a single location,
without having to take the time to enter search criteria when you're on the
phone with the client.
That's an odd way to do business. When I'm talking to a client about a
specific issue, I prefer to have all correspondence regarding that issue
in front of me, looking at the inquiry the client sent me last year is
probably a waste of time, looking at what action I'm taking on the
inquiry they made this morning is far more likely to be useful to the
current conversation.
What I should and shouldn't do with Outlook is not an MVP's place to say.
Indeed, but once in a while, you may learn a tip or trick that will
improve your productivity.
I do use Search if I'm trying to find that obscure one-of-a-kind message
that referenced a web site several months ago, or the long e-mail from Aunt
Tillie where she gave me her recipe for goulash. But not when I'm dealing
with clients; it has to be faster than that.
And oh BTW, a data base does exactly the same thing a filing cabinet does.
No, it really doesn't. The key difference is that a filing cabinet can
only be ordered, sorted (and filtered, by virtue of the sort order) in
one way, any other method requires manual intervention.
A database doesn't have that limitation, any indexed field can be used
as the filter key. In the context of email, there is no right answer,
sometimes you're looking for past correspondence from the customer on
the phone, sometimes you're looking for all activities regarding a
specific request (which may involve internal communication, or other
vendors as well)
This is where the concept of search *folders* really shine, you don't
need to choose, or to manually file items, you can let the computer do
the work for you.
That being said, Outlook isn't a particularly strong implementation,
something like Goldmine really shows off how useful this can be.
