I’m cleaning up my inboxes. I just got my main inbox down to a staggeringly small 45 emails. This is not counting ones stuffed away in folders, and only sixteen of them are more than a month old.
My sent mail, however was up over 1700. Man, that hurts. The oldest ones are from January 2005.
Why clean ‘em out? It takes up space for one. Not just on the hard drive, but it is also mental clutter. And really, do I *need* to keep many of those emails? Um, NO. Not even printed off. I never print out emails, unless they have directions in them. If there’s something I need to save, I either save the attachments elsewhere or stuff it off in a “to keep” folder.
When I look at my inbox and it has screens upon screens of emails, it gets really overwhelming and I tend to get fuzzy-headed and blank out on replying. This helps me get around to it sooner, as the list appears shorter. 
See?
Another reason to clean them out is your mail program will run a heck of a lot faster. (assuming you’re not using web-based email here)
I have FOUR seperate emails that come in directly to my desktop, in four inboxes, in one email program. Spam gets caught and tossed automatically, so that doesn’t count. Mailing lists and blog comments get filtered into folders because they aren’t immediate – usually. I’m sure many of the things I do that are second-nature to me and easily forgotten.
Anyone want to add more tips for managing the Inbox Beast? 
I bcc all outgoing emails to a Gmail account. That way, the archive is out of sight – out of mind, but I can get to a 1 year old email if I needed it for some reason.
I need to manage my inbox better too. When I have several hundred and when it’s creeping up to a thousand, I make a folder called old inbox(insert month) (insert date) and then copy everything from my inbox into there. Not exactly neat and I highly depend on my search function, lol.