I, like most people here, get a lot of email - mailing lists, bug notifications, notifications from services I don't care about, and even the occasional real email from friends and family. In short, my email became a source agnostic dumping ground which served as a constant distraction and annoyance. Everything from someone un-CCing themselves from a bug report, to telling me about their marriage is suddenly equal.

I had some trouble dealing with it all, and felt there was information overload and started looking at alternate means of getting the information that actually matters to me.

I want to hear how you manage your email and information overload. Are there some specific workflows like Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" which seem to have worked for you? Are there any secret and interesting email clients that help you deal with information overload?

My workflow is slightly better now. I use sup [1] to read and vim to write my messages. I wrote my own tool [2] to deal with bugzilla and comment notifications. I've learned to turn off email and check it only once every few hours - which helped boost productivity at the expense of not being instantly available.

So please, share your secrets! Thank you!

[1] - http://sup.rubyforge.org [2] - http://anirudhsanjeev.org/projects/splatter