I use Thunderbird at work and Mail.app and Outlook 2007 at home. All the same way.

I never have more than 2 or 3 mails in my inbox.

Interesting theory. My desk is usually covered in a pile of proofs, invoices and random magazines. I’m much better at keeping my inbox clear!

Mind you, my Windows desktop is always fairly clear of detritus, so there might be some sort of strange link going on there…

I just use Gmail. But I do the same thing.
I “star’ any emails that I may need to keep and leave them in the inbox.
As soon as I’ve read an email an archive it (no need to delete with gmail).
So when I’m on a computer I will have only starred emails that require attention at some point and thats it.

I’d always used my Outlook Inbox as a sort of to-do list but found once the list of items spanned off the bottom of the viewable screen area I would deal with newer mails I could see at the top and the older ones would be left off-screen to be dealt with ‘later’…

Now I use a combination of the David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology along with my nozbe.com account which works on those same principles. Each item is filed according to the GTD process. My Nozbe lists store what I need to do by project, who I’m waiting on for a reply, and everything else that might be relevant ’someday’. I’ve never been one for life-changing self-help stuff, but I make an exception for GTD and Nozbe.

I used to have multiple POP3 accounts at work and home but the lack of syncronisation became an issue. I moved to a hosted Exchange account so now whether by Outlook, webmail, or push email they all stay in sync.

Oh there’s a good article here… Personally I maximise my “wilfully perverse” score by running Lotus Notes. On a Mac. This stops email bores dead in their tracks, mainly because I also use the OpenNTF mail template – in Notes, mail is just another neatly customisable database. There are loads of methodologies out there for “being tidy” with emails, and some of them actually end up as custom mail front-ends, in Notes or elsewhere. GTD is now practically on a par with Tom Cruise’s favourite religion; there’s another thing called 43Things (I think, I’m one of those people who can’t remember numbers like that: it might be 38 things)…

While lots of Notes wonks use agents to sort their mails into folders on arrival (because Notes jumps to the next unread message, across folders, by the Tab key), I cheat a bit, and use the free-text search every few weeks to grab the mails from particular people, do a select all, and throw them into a folder. This means my inbox stays fairly tidy, but more importantly, it ends up containing only the weird mails that don’t yet have a folder… which eventually irritates me enough that I make a folder for them.

There was a rather fab smart mail template for Notes called Bifrost soemthing-or-other done as an academic exercise, but sadly the uthors don’t seem to have left it anywhere findable.

(oh, and my desks – I have four, basically – are all identical. Not an inch of actual wood or glass is visible…

I don’t think it’s that unusual, Tim. You might find “Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity” (GTD) an interesting read. It’s all about dealing with things as soon as they arrive, even if it’s just filing them somewhere, so that they don’t get in the way of what you’re currently doing/thinking about. My partner swears by it.

Chandler – the open source PIM that was written about in “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software” (another good read, btw) – is somewhat based on the principles of GTD.

I use NEO Pro (an add-in for Outlook: http://www.caelo.com/) at work – and as a result, I have an empty Inbox (well, it’s called Active mail) over 90% of the time. (This does take a little while to configure though). At home, I use Outlook w/o NEO, and… it’s a mess.

I live by Outlook’s Categories. As soon as a mail comes in I assign it a Category. I try to adopt the deal with it there and then approach, but sometimes that just isn’t possible with deadlines.

Categories can be likened to Gmail’s Labels or “Web 2.0″ websites tagging mechanisms in that you can assign multiple Categories to a single Outlook item–that’s right, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, anything. As a consequence I have very few folders.

A perfect example is if I’m working for a client but dealing with multiple contacts I can just group them by assigning their e-mails with a Category which is the same name as their company. This helps with lumping in supplier e-mails that are related to the company I’m dealing with. My inbox currently has 303 items believe it or not, but grouped by Category. A simple right-click give collapse all or expand all access and if viewing with the Preview Pane on the right Outlook 2003 automatically converts the message list to two-line view with a column called Arrange By: – a simple left-click on that brings a drop-down list of which I’m frequently switching between grouping by Categories or Date.

This also makes searching less required and certainly faster.

Nothing bad about being tidy with e-mail ….. I find it is the only way to cope. I have an archive file and lots of folders in it so that I can find things and I keep this open with Outlook. When this archive gets to 1GB I cut out all old stuff into another archive. It is easy with the Options menu to add/remove PST files or Archives when you need to access old stuff. I tend to file archives by year so I have a good idea where an old e-mail will be. I use Express for other e-mail accounts and personal stuff and that does not easily allow archiving like Outlook.

I cannot image working with lots of e-mail in the inbox ….I too use the inbox as a to do list and my send box to make sure I have got a reply to any questions or requests for action I send by e-mail.