Stop digging through threads for attachments — turn them into a library

"Can you send me that contract again?" is one of the most common emails in the world, and it exists because of a design flaw: the document you need is attached to a message, the message is in a thread, the thread is somewhere in a mailbox, and the mailbox is one of several. Search helps if you remember the subject line. Nobody remembers the subject line.

Mail clients have treated attachments as part of the message for thirty years. That's correct for the message. It's wrong for you, because you don't think "the message Priya sent on the 2nd"; you think "the Q3 budget spreadsheet".

A better model: the document library

Imagine every document anyone sends you, from every address you have, landing automatically in one place — a grid with the file, who sent it, when, which of your addresses it came to, and the subject of the message it came with. Not a folder you have to maintain. Not something you have to remember to save. Just there.

Three things make that model work, and all three are details that are easy to get wrong.

1. Only documents. The reason nobody browses "all attachments" in their mail app is that it's 95% noise: every logo in every signature, every tracking pixel, every inline screenshot. A useful library collects PDFs, Word and Excel and PowerPoint files, CSVs, text and the OpenDocument formats — and leaves pictures out, including the ones that are technically attachments.

2. Only from mail you received. Your own sent mail, drafts, the junk folder and the bin shouldn't feed it. A library of things people sent you is useful; a library that includes the three drafts of your own proposal is not.

3. Grouping that matches how you look for things. Sometimes you want the newest document. Often you want "everything Accounts Payable has sent me" or "everything that came to the business address". Grouping by sender and by address, with a click, is what turns a list into a filing system.

How Converge's Documents and Files works

Documents and Files sits in the sidebar under All sent. It fills itself.

• New mail is checked as it arrives. When a message with a document attachment lands in any of your inboxes, the document is added to the library within seconds, with the sender, date, subject and the address it came to.
• Older mail is worked through gradually. When you add an address, Converge goes back through what's already there a few messages at a time, newest first, so the library fills in without hammering your mail server.
• Pictures stay out. Signature logos, inline images and photos are never collected. The filter looks at the file type and name, not just the attachment flag.
• The grid shows what you need to find things: file, account (with its colour), received date, sender, subject. The subject opens the original email. Every file can be downloaded, or removed from the library without touching the email.
• Group by sender or by account, collapse the groups you don't need, and search across file names, senders and subjects.
• Keep copies in your own cloud. Under Settings you can have every document also copied to a folder in Google Drive or Dropbox, so the library is also a backup you control.

It's also on the phone: the same library, opened through the share sheet into whichever app you use for PDFs or spreadsheets.

What this changes day to day

The email asking for the contract again stops. So does the Saturday-morning scroll through a thread looking for the invoice. When someone says "the deck from last week", you open Documents and Files, group by sender, and it's the second row.

And because the library is per address, the shared billing@ mailbox — the one that gets every supplier's invoice — becomes something you can actually see at a glance: every invoice, every supplier, in order, without opening a single email.

Try it

Create a free Converge login, add an address that gets documents, and open Documents and Files after the first sync. The first 500 members get a year free.