I get upwards of 200 emails a day at work. However, with the system of filters that I've set up, maybe 6-10 actually hit my inbox. The rest go to labels where I can read them (or not) at my leasure. A lot of people seem to find email overwhelming, but with the system I have, I can read important emails as soon as they come in, and leave the rest for a few times a day where I just go through my labels and "Mark as read" after scanning them for interesting tidbits.
We use Gmail at work (actually, Google Apps) so this is pretty specific to setting up Gmail filters, but the general idea is the same for any email client.
So the vast majority of email I get is because of mailing lists I'm subscribed to, rather than email that's addressed directly to me. It's the email that's addressed directly to me that's actually important, so for the most part, I want all mailing list emails to go to some label other than my inbox, and only things addressed directly to me come to my inbox. The easiest way to get started is after you've subscribed to a mailing list, wait for that first message to arrive. Then, from the drop-down on the menu, choose "Filter messages like this":
This will pop up the filter/search popup (the new Gmail interface isn't really as good as the old one in this respect, in my opinion) into which you can type additional criteria. The one I usually choose is to add "to:me@example.com" (i.e. my email address) in the "Doesn't have" field (for reasons that will become clear in a second):
Next, click "Create filter with this search". This will take you to the next step where you set up the actions you want to take. Because it's a mailing list and I don't want it to appear in my inbox, I check "Skip the Inbox", then I check "Apply the label:" and give it a nice label name. Finally, I'll check the "Also apply filter to..." checkbox.
Clicking "Create filter" then starts the whole show.
Now, once I've done this for all of the mailing lists I subscribe to, what I do a couple of times per day, I'll see my email looks like this:
(Sorry, it's my work email, I've blurred some of the "sensitive" label names...)
As you can see, I've got a couple of unread emails in a few of the labels, so I'll just go through them, scan the subject lines. If they look interesting, I'll read it. If not, I'll just choose "Mark all as read" from the "More" drop-down to mark all the messages as having been read. Now obviously, when I come in of a morning, I'll have quite a few more than this small selection of unread emails (I'm in Australia and the majority of my workmates are in the U.S.) so a sweep of my email takes a little longer first thing in the morning. But generally, I spend no more than about 15 minutes in the morning, and 5 minutes or so a couple of times per day go through this routine.
A couple of important points about my system:
- The "to:me@example.com" in the "Doesn't have" part of the filter is important. The reason being, if I reply to a mailing list message, generally I'll want to be sure to read any replies to my replies. Having that in the filter ensures that any messages which are sent directly to me in addition to being sent to the mailing list will appear in my inbox. This is particularly important with things like the "escalations" label -- if someone adds me directly to the "To" field in an escalation, it's something I need to read!
- You need to be a little OCD about marking messages as read. If you don't, then you end up ignoring the messages in labels altogether, and that really does defeat the purpose.
- I typically don't have one-label-per-mailing list. Usually, I have many mailing lists going into one label (for example, my "misc" label has the "misc-au" mailing list, "menu", "forsale" and all those occasionally-interesting-but-not-right-now mailing lists). Keep the number of labels small enough that you can fit the whole list on your screen at once (the "right-side chat" lab is good for adding a bit of extra vertical real estate to the label list). This way, you can see at a glance which labels have unread messages in them.
- Another trick for keeping the label list short is to choose the "Show if unread" option from the little drop-down menu to the right of the label. That way, if the label has no unread messages, it'll be hidden from the list (click on "More" to see it).
- I keep my inbox empty. If a message doesn't need to be actioned then it's archived. Generally, there's only 3-4 messages that I actually keep around (to remind me of whatever). Theoretically, you could star messages you want to remember and just leave the rest in your inbox, but the sense of accomplishment in clearing your inbox -- actually clearing it -- is really worth the additional burden of having to search a bit more for older email.
My recommendation, if you're one of the ones feeling overwhelmed and you want to try my system, is to start from scratch. Remove all of your filters, all of your labels, and archive all of your email as of this moment. Trust me, you'll feel really liberated! Then as emails start coming in, set up your filters and labels as I've described above. You can create new labels directly from the filter setup window, so that's pretty easy. You can also retroactively apply labels to messages you've already archived, so all of your past email will appear in the correct labels, too.