Now that I have my new machine and have finally gotten my data moved over to it (more on that in a later post), I’ve been experimenting with a different way to manage my email. Historically, I’ve kept it all broken down into different folders – one main folder, one for orders and receipts, one for fantasy football stuff, one for online poker, and so on. But I figured that I might as well try to take advantage of the nice search functionality on my new Mac and just keep everything in one folder and just use searches to break it down from there. Instead of separate folders, or mailboxes to use the Mac term, I’d have smart mailboxes, which are just searches that are saved for easy access. They look just like other mailboxes, but their contents are updated automatically based on the search. In other words, instead of moving mail to the Fantasy Football folder based on some rules, I’ll just set up a search that governs which messages the Fantasy Football smart mailbox includes.

I decided to be cautious about it and not mess things up without trying it first, so I left all the mail in separate folders while I experimented with the smart mailboxes. For the fantasy football one, I set it up to just grab anything with the phrase “fantasy football” in it. Sounds logical, right? But I immediately noticed that my new fantasy football smart mailbox had more messages than my old fantasy football folder. At first, this seemed like a good thing to me – my old rules had been based on the sender being affiliated with ESPN or CBS or whoever, and didn’t catch mail sent from people in my league directly to me (usually talking trash). With the smart mailbox, these other mails were getting included without me having to move them around, which as I said was a good thing. But then I saw one that had absolutely nothing to do with fantasy football. I looked at it for a couple of minutes, but I still couldn’t figure out why it was getting included. It was from my friend Jennifer, and she was asking me if I could buy some software for her. Eventually, I noticed that, all the way at the bottom of the message, there was a little blurb from her email provider (with a link to go along with it):

“Yahoo! Sports
Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football”

Great. So now my plan is all messed up, but not for any good reason. It’s messed up because stupid Yahoo insisted on including some stupid advertising in Jennifer’s email, and now that email contains things that are completely unrelated to the contents of the email. Now I get to choose between sticking with my old system or living with a few false positives. It’s things like this that make me really detest advertising. Putting aside the whole annoyance thing, as computers evolve to make more and more use of searches and indexing, things like this will really start to gum up the works.