F or all of the attention to the Web, search engines, and browsers, email remains the connection to the Internet that many of us use the most frequently. The ability to communicate between two individuals without having to resort to phone tag or the more formal approaches of postal mail or even fax makes email the perfect medium for sending informal, brief messages to colleagues, friends, and family. But popularity breeds excess. Unless the local system has set a maximum size on your Inbox, there is no real limit to how many daily messages you can receive. The more email you use, the more lists you join, and the more widely your email address is advertised, the more messages come in.
Systems now filter most of the junk mail, but some still gets through.
And if there is no system filter set up and your email address has been snared by the email direct marketers, you'll quickly want to set up filters of your own. With email, it is not as simple to quickly identify an important message from a new thread on a listserv. The high priority message from a boss can look disconcertingly similar to junk mail. The filters available from most modern email programs help automate the process of sorting and organizing email messages. Filters work well in conjunction with the ability to sort and store messages in different folders.