I suspect that you all receive a lot of email. So do I. Let me give you an idea. In my Gmail account (the one I use for most personal and private business correspondence) there are currently 7817 messages; this represents the traffic since last December 1, less some deleted. It does not include the 4188 messages in my Spam Folder (they are deleted automatically after 30 days, so multiply that by 7 months for the spam total). Nor does it include my other ten email accounts, including the big one -- my school account -- which has some 2000 messages dating back to last December. In short, I get a LOT of stuff. A lot of it is quasi-spam -- that is, advertising or other newsletters, or other stuff of some value, but not personal.

So how do you handle your own volume? I must confess that I handle most of mine by ignoring it. Of course, that means I sometimes miss messages I should have. But I'm pretty stymied about what to do.

So -- tell us about your own email traffic, and what you do about it., When we've got some reasonable amount of thoughts on the table, I'll pose another related question for your consideration.