I talk to a lot of people about email for a wide variety of reasons but the most common theme is how to manage and store the vast amount of email we receive.
If you use something like Google for email it will do a lot of filtering for you. However I still like to be in control of my email servers so we’re still using IMAP/POP3. I could setup hundreds of rules for filtering things to different folders but I really don’t have to, because I have SaneBox (affiliate link – but only because I believe it’s a great product!),
SaneBox only leaves in my inbox what it believes I actually need to see (and training it is as simple as dragging items from the folder they’ve been filtered to back to the inbox, or vice-versa!), it can remind of me things, put all my news items in a folder etc. It’s definitely worth a look. That still leaves a lot in my inbox though….
I use Thunderbird for mail (old school I know, but I’ve yet to find something that can do archiving as well as Thunderbird), so I have some offline and online folders. Once a folder is in a position where I probably don’t need access to it all the time, it gets dragged down from online to offline (and make sure my machine is backed up regularly!).
I have the luxury of it being our server, so I don’t need to keep my usage down, but what I advise a lot of people to do is use IMAP on their phones and tablets whilst they’re out and about, and set POP3 with a convenient time to leave the messages on the server, for example – leave the last 30 days on the server and download everything else for offline – this works really well for keeping your inbox size down.
Photo by Skley 
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