James Duncan Davidson, in a piece titled “Effective Email Bankruptcy”:
What I had to do was establish that my relationship with email was broken. Once I did that, I had to figure out how to fix it. Watching Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk helped immensely as did reading his Inbox Zero series. Somewhere in all of that, he states that the way you deal with email has had to change over the last decade. And, he’s right. I just missed the boat and, as a result, got way out of whack.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I silently declared effective email bankruptcy. I moved those 8000+ messages off to their own DMZ folder and started practicing the whole Inbox Zero thing.
Read John’s thoughts regarding Rethinking Email