It took some time for me to find a good workflow to manage email, but finally I got it. The main issue I encountered was on the conversations: because of my job, I need to be informed of a lot of things, and email conversation can go on for more than one week. Although it is easy to decide if a message is actionable, must be kept for reference or can be deleted, the problem is timing, especially for the third category: many messages are important now, and must be kept for reference, but they will be meaningless in some time. True, I could simply archive those messages with the others, the disk space is not an issue today, but there is always that bad feeling of useless stuff growing for no reasons.

For me the solution is to have an additional category, a buffer if you want, that I know will be deleted in some time. At last my Inbox is always empty at the end of the day. All the messages go to a single archive folder, some tagged as “removein5weeks”; all actionable items go to the GTD application immediately, so there is no need to keep them in the Inbox. During the weekly review, I open a smart folder which shows all the messages tagged “removein5weeks” and which have been in the system for more than five weeks, and I delete everything. The five weeks frame works for me, but it could be different.

I am a Mac user, and I have implemented the workflow using Mail.app, MailTags, and MailActOn. When I process my Inbox I have three shortcuts:

• Send the message to the GTD application (OmniFocus for me);
• Move the message to the archive folder, for reference;
• Move the message to the archive folder, AND add the tag “removein5weeks”.

For the first time I know that my email program only contains new messages, things that I could search in the future, and nothing more. No more bad feelings looking at the thousands of messages stacked in the Inbox, no more fear of forgetting the only important message in there, because I didn’t act immediately on it.