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If you want these items out of your email (this appears to be at least a secondary motivation), the best way to collect and aggregate useful snippets is something like OneNote, Dropbox, or Evernote. Each of these applications will have their own strengths and weaknesses, with all of them being very powerful in the accessible and searchable functional areas ...

For making your Gmail Inbox to zero you should use ActiveInbox activeinboxhq.com For Finding who has been sending you most mails use, Awayfind it has this feature awayfind.com & Gmail meter Gmail Meter

I make heavy use of Categories in Outlook 2010 to manage my email archive. I've also mapped "Quick Steps" to shortcut keys to speed operations. My daily work is managed in a GTD process, so I have those quick steps set up to create Task entries for my task lists, too. I used to file email in folders by projects. I found that too often, an email might ...

There seem to be two general schools of thought for dealing with email. Broadly they are filing and searching. Filing would see you have an appropriate directory structure, likely within your email client, to forward sort the messages into. If this can be suppored by automatic rules based on unambiguous subject lines, e.g. [HR Update], all the better. ...

If you work by client or by project, then folders for each one will make it easier to find those emails later when there are questions. I also have a folder for any messages that tell me what a wonderful job I did. I use these to qualitify how often I have pleased the clients when I do my performance evaluation so I accumulate them through the year. I also ...

The biggest way I can think of to improve it is to get less emails. If emails are unimportant, why do you need to receive them? Personally, I prefer to classify emails more granularly. "newsletter", "production alerts", etc. That way I can deal with one topic at a time. Also, are you automating classifying or manually doing it? If manually, consider an ...

The urgency/importance concept comes from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and not really suited to this particular context. I think going to something from Getting Things Done will probably work out better under the circumstances (I also use Mail and have a similar setup I've been using for a few years now). The concept is processing the inbox ...

I think you are asking the wrong question. As Jeanne says, you should ask yourself: "How can I receive less emails?" Try to unsubscribe to as many newsletters as possible, you probably don't read them all. I do it as i receive a new email, I click on the "Unsubscribe" link in the email. Delete all the unread emails that you are not interested in reading ...

I think you can get exactly what you're looking for with an IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe. You can create a search that will scan gmail for things like "from:me subject:journal" (or however you want to set it up), then append the contents of it to a Google doc. Here is a search for recipes that should get you started. ...

Set up filters in Gmail to categorize certain bulk mail that you may still want to receive, but not necessarily have polluting your inbox proper. Create a label for each category and set the filter to apply your label and skip the inbox (archive). Apply the filter to existing mail. This approach is also crucial for discussion mailing lists that you don't ...

TL;DR: Get rid of the garbage (with filters) and get used to the fact that you cannot use your mail as you could when you were on highschool. Here in my company, access to 'personal stuff' (Facebook, Twitter, mail, etc) is denied / blocked. Of course, if you have a mobile phone, you can check it once in a while. There are, on the other side of spectrum, ...

Depends how automatic you would like it... As a first step - a carefully designed gmail bookmarklet would be a start - I designed this link to show emails in a gmail inbox that are older than 24 hours - and by slightly changing the search string you'd have all the emails you wanted to archive there for you... (Code for the bookmarklet equivelent of the ...

I should probably give my experiences since trying this. The Pros. It's been good for focusing me on the do it now tasks that would have got done sometime in the day anyway - but it's reduced the vauge laten guilt that builds up around such tasks. It's probably an overall improvement in productivity since I can quickly answer all of the days emails in ...

For bulk email--- you have to try out the awesome unroll.me to stick all newsletters into one label (and receive an email summary daily). Easy to unsubscribe there as well. For inbox zero, it's all about "processing" your inbox. I've written a bit of how I approach the subject here, and for the past few months I've been dominating 2 inboxes with about 200 ...

I'd like to shamelessly recommend Beeminder's GmailZero tool: http://gmailzero.com It's kind of the nuclear option if you're too much of an incorrigible procrastinator for any of the other awesome tools in the other answers to work for you. It's a way to truly force yourself to gradually get your inbox down to zero. Beeminder in general is part Quantified ...

Keeping the emails in a reference folder in your email program isn't bad, as long as that's where you know to look for your reference information. The "best" place to store information is where you know you'll look for it when you need it. I use Evernote for most of my reference information. That lets me get to it on any platform, and fully searchable. ...

I think it is a matter of my priorities: Have I been given a deadline by a boss or client? Am I unable to reschedule this task? e.g. Can't wait until next week because I'm at a conference. There is no negative history of contacting this other person. I'd be less inclined to automatically call, but it is something to think about. A big problem in many ...

The other answers to this question are a terrific compendium of best practices that are well known to people who have already explored the topic of handling email efficiently: unsubscribe from mailing lists you're not reading filter incoming mail automatically as much as possible handle mail only one time and get it out of the inbox timebox your email ...

One of the canonical sources for the advice in the other answers is Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero video and articles. The key theme through all of the answers, and with Inbox Zero, is that if you're looking for a way to prioritize your email you're asking the wrong question. The right question is how do I process my email effectively to harvest all of the ...

I've written something like this for internal company use, but don't know of any application that is generally available. A hack you might consider would be to set up a private blog or blog-like-site that accepts post by mail. It won't append to a single document, but all your mail would be in once place. Self-hosted WordPress would allow this, for ...

What folders you need depends on your workflow. I'd say the bare miminum would be: Inbox Archive Deleted I used to have innumerable folders. But ever since Gmail has exceptional search functionality and Microsoft Outlook 2010's search sucks less than it used to, I have fewer and fewer folders. This is what I require for my workflow. Inbox: Everything ...

You can do whatever works for you. If the e-mail organization does what you need, why change it? A couple of other suggesstions: Another way to manage the e-mails is to tag them. I do this in Mozilla Thunderbird. That way, if you ever find yourself wanting to put an e-mail in two folders, you can apply two tags to it, and search by tag. Another way is ...

I tend to work 9 - 12 hours a day in my main job, then am on two professional committees, moderate two Stack Exchange sites, play in a gigging rock band and am raising 3 kids and still don't find a problem with emails, either at work or at home. And I get around 4-500 emails a day at work and maybe 150 a day at home. I think a lot of it is down to personal ...

No offense, but I have a feeling you got 'snippets' of GTD out there on the web but you have not read the book. For example what you say about 'having 0 actionables', does not make much sense; in GTD terms, the only day you have '0 actionables' is because you're no longer breathing. David Allen's point is that life continuously throws stuff at us, stuff ...

I have my own productivity system that I use, and while there's some crossover with formal GTD techniques, I'm not sure if this is one. One rule that I make is that once something is beyond my direct control, I delete it. I do a lot of unit testing and frequently submit bug reports. That's all I'm required to do. If I get a fixed bug report back. I ask ...

Since you want to peruse these deal e-mails, you'll want to start filtering ones that you're pretty sure you won't have interest in. No one is interested in purchasing every kind of product. Let's say that you have no interest in dresses. You can filter out deal e-mails that have "dress*" in the subject line, body, whatever. I do this in Mozilla ...

The day I unsubscribed from EVERY email subscription I was getting was truly liberating. I had hit a point when simply deleting automatic mail was taking way too much time and attention from me. I highly recommend a reset. Second, I've read about people declaring "email bankruptcy". It's simply sending an automatic email to anyone who sent you an unread ...

I have used two project/list/note applications recently. Circus Ponies Notebook and Things by Cultured Code. This is on a Mac. Both of them have a way to select text from any application and use a pull-right menu to select "System Services" which can transfer the selected text into the note taking app. In the case where the text is coming from an email ...