I have looked at paperless in the past and just asked why? I just spent a little time setting it up to see what it was about, then I spent hours configuring it and my email server creating paperless email addresses that other emails forward to! I cannot believe I have lived this long without it.
I run a small it company. Each month I have to sort all tax relevant documents and hand them to my tax office.
So I download the tx CSV from my accounts. Those get parsed and the relevant invoices get searched in paperless, so I see if something is missing etc with a few minutes of manual work.
Asked myself which documents I have to keep for how long. I found this German Verbraucherzentrale article (Google translated) about document retention times.
But that information doesn’t give me a workflow. What are your workflows for new documents to scan(tags, correspondent, unique number). How do you keep track of out-aged paper which can be disposed? What’s your pdf backup strategy?
I posted my paperless backup strategy here: https://lemmy.world/post/46429607
As for retention time, in digital I don’t care. Storage is cheap enough for that amount of data.
Paper I tend to only keep very important documents, but haven’t done a full inventory scan yet.
I haven’t looked into Paperless much, but what does your workflow look like exactly with regards to the emailing part?
I solved it for me by sorting by attachment off I’m thunder thunderbird Desktop once a week and then just drag and drop to the second account which gets consumed by paperless. It’s nice that imap can do that with drag and drop
I forward emails to my paperless address, and never thought of using drag/drop. How does this work for you? I remember having trouble getting paperless to see emails that were already read, or otherwise it would constantly try to reupload the same files. Do you watch a specific folder and then have paperless move to a different folder on consumption?
I have an paperless account and shared it with my user, but you can also just integrate 2 accounts in one email client.
Guess I should create a sieve filter to look for relevant mails and auto-copy
I got an unlimitted email package from a host, before my journey into self hosting. I use a different email address for everything I sign up to or need to confirm I am human with. They all forward to 6 or 7 different emails I check I have just decided that those email addresses would forward to paperless email address to keep stuff sorted.
*edit I get next to no spam, if I do I either close the email or tell the company they have had a data leak and close the email.
Hold on, I’m a little confused. Are you talking about paperless the document management software (and it’s ng/ngx forks) or a different software with the same name?
Because you can set up mail inbox processing in that software but I’m not sure how that connects to forwarding to multiple different mailboxes, or vice versa profit from merging multiple forwards.
Sounds like OP does something similar to what I do. They setup different email inboxes or catchalls for different services, then as email comes in it gets forwarded to paperless for OCR/search maybe?
I do this with paperless-ngx, where I forward some emails to a dedicated address that paperless watches. But I do this manually with emails that have important PDFs attached.
I’m not sure what the benefit is of automatically forwarding everything to paperless. Seems like duplicating emails unnecessarily, when email clients already have search/folder functions. Also email servers have mail rules so they can be sorted based on sender/recipient/subject/etc…