This has become a bit of a meme -- that one should always drive one's email inbox to empty, and not use it as a reading list, filing cabinet, or todo list.
Some solutions for doing so are variations of declaring email bankruptcy and just deleting everything, but I think that's a false and potentially irresponsible solution. As Rory Vaden writes in "Delete This: 7 Tips for Getting Your Inbox to Zero," in Fast Company, "that doesn’t work in the real world. In the real world I have customers, employees, vendors, accountants, family, and friends who are all expecting a response and often needing a response to move initiatives forward in their lives."
Vaden goes on to write
And while I do also appreciate the efforts of -- and have derived some value from -- the world's well-meaning "time management experts," I have found that most of them have created systems whose complexities create more stress and work than they solve, or they have strategies that work on their own inboxes because they don’t actually have what resembles a real corporate job with lots of various stakeholders.
So what does work in the real world? I’m not sure that I have the real answer -- in fact I’m pretty sure that I don’t. What I do have is a few survival strategies that seemed to help me keep my beast of an inbox at bay and under some type of reasonable control. ...
While I disagree with some of Vaden's strategies -- saving messages outside of the email system, as Word documents? -- and some are just plain quaint -- have your assistant weed your inbox? -- his tips are generally good.
Personally, I highly recommend you read Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, by Mark Hurst. (Reasonably decent summary here.) Hurst covers the key strategy -- act on each message or delegate, defer, delete, archive, or ignore it -- in addition to offering some useful philosophical perspectives.
williamgarrity