Ooookay here we go.

I have 3 mailboxes I care about: 1) 15+ year old "personal" address at my very first ISP that I still pay $5/month for, 2) GMail -- used mainly for commercial stuff and personal emails with not-close-friends, 3) Work

Then I keep a couple aliases around that point to my GMail account so I can, for example, put "webspamjan2012@privatedomain.com" (which forwards to GMail) into websites for a while, and maybe delete it if I want to. One of my aliases has been around forever and gets all the stuff from places I deal with often like Amazon, Newegg, every bank, every bill, etc.

My personal email account (#1) receives very little mail (maybe 10-20 messages per month) and 80%+ of it is from human beings I know who I actually want to talk to sending me personal messages (not forwarded "funny" shit). There is no fancy filtering -- just one "big" Inbox. I don't give this email out to anyone but close(-ish) friends/family. It gets zero spam and I've had it for 15 years.

My GMail account (#2) is where I give less fucks. There are some minor filter rules on it like all my @uw.org email goes to a certain folder, all my automatic payment bills go to a certain folder, and a couple others; there are about 5 folders total and I rarely mess with the filter settings. This box gets 20-30 emails per day and maybe 1 spam message every 1-2 months. It has probably 4-5 actively used aliases on other domains pointing at it.

And my work account is heavily filtered. First into automatic system messages vs. human messages. Then into automatic system messages I actually care about and ones I ignore 99% of the time. Humans get split up by their department within the company, or in to mailing lists. Some of the folders each of these groups are split into are then "unsubscribed" from so I don't actually see the folders day to day, but I can go "subscribe" to the folder and get the messages if I want to see them.

As a result of all of this, I rarely have more than 1-2 unread messages in either of my personal accounts, and rarely more than 20-30 things unread in my work account.

All of my filtering is done on the server-side using procmail (an oldschool and extremely flexible filtering program for Unix-based systems) -- I have zero filters in my clients of choice (Thunderbird and OSX Mail) and this is a best practice: you want all your filtering done on the server, not on the client.

I never delete any email and have mostly complete email archives going back to about 1994, when I was 11 years old and using AOL. I probably have 95% of every email I've ever sent or received in my life. This is not overwhelming because it's all well organized. About 5 years ago I broke off an archive and use an alternate system go get into emails older than about 5 years (which is very rare, but occasionally happens).

FINALLY, I hate email -- it is extremely inefficient, prone to all sorts of random problems, mail servers are a pain in the ass to maintain and fix, and it is used for about a million things it was never designed to do. At every single opportunity I steer my company towards using anything but email (ticketing systems, instant messaging, VPN and network sharing, collaborative software suites).

I have learned that it is a huge yellow flag if your company runs entirely on gigantic emails that have been forwarded between 3 departments and have CC lists 15 people long. Most people don't realize how extremely inefficient this is.

GTD is good and worth reading, even if you don't use all of it. Merlin Mann has some good stuff too on the 43 Folders blog and the Back to Work podcast. If you are using mac/iphone/ipad, omnifocus is a nice GTD app that plays well with Mail.app and Postbox. You can send e-mails directly to OF as a task.

The inbox zero idea is that the inbox is a holding tank/triage area. whether you're deleting a mail or moving it to another place, the goal is to look at the mail in the Inbox and then do something with it.

If it's less than two minutes, just respond. Otherwise, put in a to-do folder mark it with a star, tag it, send it to an omnifocus project, or whatever. The key is putting it somewhere that you can retrieve and keep track of it, so it doesn't fall through the cracks.

While I'm bad about doing this, many gtd people suggest it's best to look at e-mail only a few time a day, particularly if you have other more focused work to do that is undermined by too many interruptions. One approach some people seem to use is to process e-mail in the morning (i.e, respond to short ones and triage the rest). Then compose messages requiring more time later in the day. If you try this,you may need to train certain people that they can't expect an immediate response from you anymore.

The thing that I found particularly helpful about gtd is that it encourages you to break things down into discrete action steps and focus on one at a time while leaving the other stuff for later. Much less overwhelming.

That said, for this to work, you have to commit to stepping back from the barrage of stuff long enough to think about the steps that are usually required to do some of it. Of course, this works better for projects where the action steps tend to repeat again and again. For the purposes of GTD, a project is anything you are trying to do that requires more than one action step to complete. I bet if you think about it, you will see that in your job, there are a fair amount of projects with repeatable steps, given that you are processing a lot of inputs and outputs of content.

Once you look at workflows, it's easier to create a set of project templates in a program like omnifocus and keep track of progress on your various projects. Or at least keep the steps in your head. It also makes it easier to develop templates and other automation strategies for speeding up certain steps in the process (e.g., around e-mail).

On practical level, I personally prefer Postbox or Thunderbird to Mail.app. The many add-ons available for TB (and to a lesser extent PB) can really help speed up certain things. In particular, Quicktext Pro for TB/PB allows you to create templates you can use for replying to repetitive e-mails (thereby turning more e-mails into <2 minutes affairs). So much easier to just type something like "bcq" Press the tab key and then have it automatically create most of the e-mail you'll need to respond to a certain sort of request you have received. Honestly, I think Outlook would probably be better than Mail.App too. None of these programs look quite as good as Mail.app, but most of them provide a few more tools than does mail.app for handling e-mail in a work context. That said, between mailtags and omnifocus, it seems like there are people who have build systems around mail.app that they really like. And mail.app does have the best mac integration, including a more full-featured applescript dictionary, which can be useful sometimes, if you are geeky enough (I'm not), or you find stuff that more geeky people have created.

In my work, have to send out a lot of documents. So I have a document cover template in quicktext pro that helps to speed up that process. I create a new message and attach a file. Then I actuate the template. It pops a series of dialog boxes asking me for file type and file description. Then it creates an e-mail pulling in the name of the file and the other boilerplate. Doing this turned a 5-7 minute process into a 2 minute one. It also cut down on errors. Maybe that doesn't seem like that big of an improvement, but if you need to do it a lot, it is.

You can accomplish some of the same things in mail.app by using textexpander. I think mailtags might also give you some of those options. But quicktext pro is better.

Beyond that, I also agree with other folks that where possible it's important to try and drive as much superfluous e-mail away from the main inbox (e.g., listerves, etc.). I've have worked sporadically on a virtual basis for an organization that sends out a lot of FYI e-mails and things like that. These are almost never relevant to me. So I filtered them out of the main inbox. That literally cut in half the e-mail I received on that account and made it much easier to see the stuff that was important.