I used to get uncomfortable when my inbox required me to scroll. Lately, inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GtD) methodology, I try to get my inbox to zero several times a day. Before you say, “I could never…”,
…this is not to say that I don’t have email that is pending an action or a reply. All it means is that I periodically do a quick scan of my inbox and sort items into folders, based on the nature of them. For example, @Today for action items that I need to do today, @Later for action items that have more flexibility, @Read for a long proposal that I can read at my leisure (a.k.a.: never :-)), @Reply for something that needs me to write a reply to them, @Wait for something where I’m waiting on something or someone else, etc… And if I can take action on something in 2 minutes or less, I typically just do it and then I can delete the email and avoid the folders and the associated overhead. It sounds simple, but it really helps me to feel more in control of my email, since it preserves the inbox as an inbox instead of a storage area, so I don’t have to keep rescanning it.
In addition to this manual processing that I do, I have a pretty extensive list of procmail filters which throw some email into /dev/null, some into folders for particular discussion lists, and one which eliminates duplicates (like when a mail goes to me and a list that I’ma member of).
The other thing that really helps me is that I gave up a while ago on trying to file emails into specific categories – it just takes too much time (resulting in me being more likely to procratinate doing it) and it has very little benefit, because it’s actually rare that I have to go back to refer to emails, and when I do, the search features in Thunderbird are good enough that I can usually find what I need. Emails that have no further action either get deleted or they go into a single _Ref folder, which holds everything. Filing into the _Ref folder is made even easier with Paul Tomlin’s Quick File extension for Thunderbird which I’ve talked about in a few posts on my blog. All it takes is Alt+Q and then Enter and the message is moved to my _Ref folder – much faster than using the mouse. With this, I have the keyboard speed of mutt, but I also can read HTML mail and easily click links, and navigating between folders is much easier.
Some more tips on processing email: