What do you use to optimize your email experience?

I use Apple Mail, and my sidebar looks like this (plus Junk, Trash etc):

Inbox — This is almost always empty. Most email I put straight into the archive.

Archive — Once I’ve dealt with the email, it goes in here.

For Later — Something to do on a rainy day, or something I’ll set a reminder for.

Notifications — My work involves regular automated status emails, and these automatically go in here. I use a mail rule for that.

Reference — Things I need to keep, like activation emails.

This system is greatly helped by the fantastic built-in search. I used to organize my email into sub-folders of Archive, but it’s hopeless to keep up with. So I thought screw it, and threw everything in one folder. I haven’t looked back, and the most time I’ll need to spend looking for something is between a couple seconds or a minute or two.

Mail and fluid.

I just use thunderbird.
@ tWrex what is Fluid?

Ooooooo… Fluid is an app for Leopard users. It’s a site specific browser that makes it easier for you to find out which site is crashing your internets. It also helps to stop those crashes by separating the instances of the browser you use.

Cool app!

Mos def! I get to use it on open source food now with coverflow so I get to see recipes before I even makes em… So sweet!

On windows i use digsby and the gmail web ui and on mac i just leave mail.app open all the time.

so I just updated my emailing. I use ymail and I use yahoo to push it to my iPhone. I’ve been craving push and yahoo does it.

My iPhone is now my main primary email client.

intelligent use of filters