Email is the bane of our lives at the moment.

Assumption: you will never have enough time to get through/respond/address all your email.

So in order to be productive you need to have a (ruthless) system.

Here's my tip for controlling email:

1. Set up folders like those below (this is a screenshot of my Outlook) with
A - 0 Today
A - 0 Tomorrow
A - 1 Top Priority
A - 2 Urgent
A - 3 Less urgent
etc

2. Each morning, go through your Inbox and move emails (based on Subject and/or Sender) into each of these folders.
[Anything from your boss should go into A - 0 Today because you will be attending to it immediately]
You may need to view the content in some, but usually you can gauge importance based on the Subject line (especially if it has the word Urgent in it :-)

3. Once you have decided on the importance of each, set your selected folder as A - 0 Today and make your top priority to be working through those items only.

4. Occassionally you can check back into your Inbox, but make sure you immediately prioritise any new emails into these folders.

5. You will note that many of the folders have emails in them that have not yet been looked at.
For a percentage of these, by the time you get around to viewing them they will be no longer relevant.

6. Once you complete all the emails in your A - 0 Today folder, go to the A - 1 Top Priority folder and drag some of these into the A - 0 Today and A - 0 Tomorrow folders.

7. Last thing each day, copy all emails from your A - 0 Tomorrow folder into your A - 0 Today folder, ready for you to work on tomorrow.

8. If you ever empty out the A - 1 Top Priority folder (unlikely!) move on to the A - 2 Urgent folder and so on.

9. It is likely you will never make it to your A - 4 Pending folder (unless you have nothing to do at work for a week or so).

When discussing this at a user group meeting people mentioned the following:
- ClearContext: an email management tool
- GTD: Getting Things Done