Email... I hate it

I was recently chatting online with a colleague from Egypt and mentioned that I had spent the trip out to a series of meetings in Australia trying to catch up with my email. Well, I've been here 3 weeks and I have just spent the evening filing some of the emails that have arrived and been dealt with since I have been here. I am beginning to hate email... and flying but that's another story...

Anyhow, he mentioned that he couldn't find a suitable way to file his email into folders. I'm sure mine is far from perfect, but Mac Mail has a great search function. Anyhow he asked me what my system was - it is firstly person name for those I deal with quite a lot, then alternatively company/organisation name for those companies that I deal with partly anonymously and partly when I don't have relationship with a person so might forget their name and finally I have some general topic folders for emails that don't fit into either of the other two categories.

But it is so big and so tiring dealing with emails. OK, so yes the emails to and from my family when I'm traveling are not tiring to deal with I like them... but the rest. I currently have about 450 individual person folders for people I deal with fairly regularly, 180 company folders and 40 general folders.

One of the things we deal with at the office is spam... creating methods of reducing it. Currently over 95% of the emails we receive at our server is spam. We have various methods that we employ to reduce that, so we get almost no spam into our email boxes. However the quantity of spam is increasing and increasing... and it looked like it might get to the stage where the world could not cope with the quantity of spam circulating and email would cease to function. Sometimes in my heart of hearts I privately hope this might happen... then at least I would not have to deal with them all!