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Sometimes it’s really hard to save time in emails (especially emails in corporate emails which really needed to reply). I used to scroll through and search the Inbox for email I need to reply. What a time wasting to wait for the search. After I hit Sent and Receive buttons, I then receive couple more emails that need to attend.

Now I have used this setup myself on my corporate email account and it is quite useful so I am going to share it to you all:

• It is always good to request a IMAP account if your company or ISP supports it, as it saves all emails and folders structure on the server side
• Set bunch of filters that moves all of the unimportant/non-urgent ones to folders. I have ExternalList directory with subdirectories for external mailing lists, and InternalList for internal memos.
• Create Archive folder for archiving. I move those important one that needed to reference in the near future to different topics in subdirectories.
• Create Action folder for getting actual things done. I create @Reply for things that is important to reply; @Today for things that is urgent; @Wait for emails that need to wait for someone; and @Read that I need to read it (eventually).
• Under Archive, I also create subdirectories of Months (i.e. 2005-05). Anything that has not moved to Action folders, I move them to those archive.
• And finally I have Spam folder for spamassassin to do its magic.

This way I will keep my Inbox clean.

This is a very good approach:

• It will save you a lot of time to search through your emails.
• You will know what is your email action items are.

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