Email, like sex, should be a pleasure not a burden. (That does not mean that one cannot get enough of it!). And in both cases keeping it fun and safe, without killing spontaneity, requires a little planning and the right equipment!
To the possible disappointment but not the surprise of anyone reading, I am going to discuss email, at once one of the greatest and most abused inventions of the twentieth century. Indeed, former University of Chicago Professor Bruce Redford once credited it with reviving the lost art of personal correspondence.
Personally, I maintain five email accounts, as follows:
1. My personal account, which I reserve for correspondence with friends and family.
2. My Gmail account, with which I take advantage of Gmail's search, sorting, scripting, and storage capabilities. Apart from personal correspondence (and a few system messages), I funnel the vast tide of mailing lists, bills, advertisements, and site registrations to Gmail, to be promptly labeled, sorted, stored, and, occasionally, read (mostly just the bill reminders).
3. My hushmail account, which lets me send encrypted mail from workstations and my iPhone.
4. My Yahoo account, which serves mainly as an OpenID for access to other Yahoo services.
5. My work account, for, well, work. It is an Outlook/Exchange system.
My software of choice, when I have a choice, is Thunderbird on the desktop. My mail client is configured to take advantage of both S/MIME and GPG encryption. For those more technically inclined, I also use the excellent Horde Project for groupware on my home server running Ubuntu Linux. This gives me web access to my email, among many other excellent features, wherever there is a browser connected on the 'net, while storing my mail on my server rather than in the cloud. I prefer to use IMAP rather than POP servers, so that whether I access my mail on my iPhone, my laptop, my destop, or a remote desktop, it is always the same.
Gmail is in some senses sui generis owing to its unique design, but I approach both my personal and work accounts from the same set of principles. These I have derived as closely as I could from David Allen's justly celebrated modern classic Getting Things Done.
In order to process my email, I have five primary folders: Inbox, @Reply, @Archive, @Pending, Spam, and Trash. Of these, the first one and last two are automatic and self-explanatory. The first goal, as often as possible, is to bring the Inbox down to zero. This can be done by immediate response and filing or immediate filing for future response. In either case, the email can either be trashed or archived. If it needs a reply that you cannot prepare until later, put it in @Reply and be sure to scan the folder at least daily. Label and sort replies by urgency and then by date, if possible.
If the email refers to something someone needs to do for you, put it in the @Pending folder, which you also need to check at least once daily.
Once an email requires no further processing or response, move it to the @Archive folder. Remember, however, that eventually the archive may grow to a size that degrades the performance of the mail server. To avoid this, I use a program that allows me to remove my mail and save it in compressed form in a file on my workstation. (Outlook has an archive function built in.). On my Linux workstation, I use a program called, appropriately enough, mailarchive. I set it to run once a month and archive any mail older than 90 days to a gzipped file. Of course, this is only helpful if one can read the file, but fortunately the mutt mail client works well for this purpose.
Now I think I have some email to catch up on.