Jeffrey Veen has it nailed in “Getting Over Archiving”:

Thus, I gave up on any sort of structured archiving … Before I had dozens of folders for people/projects/themes, etc. etc. Blech. Now, I’ve got a folder with thousands of messages that I rotate once a year or so. … The bigger point here, of course, is that people who think for a living are relying more and more on search rather than browse — and eventually personal social networks — to manage the overwhelmingly complex amount of data that they need to transform daily into information, and ultimately understanding.

I miss a nice hierarchy. I still maintain hierarchies at work because it does save time on things that I have to reference, but I don’t go past the project level down to the task level. [Some of my projects can be so small that some people see them as tasks, but because they have multiple steps, they're not tasks.] But in thinking on it, I’m finding little-to-no utility in hierarchies for personal mail, which is an absolutely crazy shift in how I think about email, because I’m buying into search rather than browse.

[And yes, Stephen, I use Lookout here at work, thanks to your urging. It works with my hierarchies because, well, I have lots of projects that have no clean edges, so there's bleed. But I can sometimes beat search with browsing. Sick but true.]

Now it’s time for me to find a mail app I like again … and to come up with a clean near-term archiving strategy manageable with IMAP, plus a better, long-term solution. Maybe I can ply Matt with vodka for his MySQL-managed mail database scripts.

Oi. I want to grieve here a little. I miss my hierarchies.