Darren Rowse spent the weekend getting his inbox from 10,000 items down to zero in less than 24 hours.

How did he do this?

Well, he started with Google’s GMail:

I moved all my email activity to Gmail

To do this I forwarded all of my previous email addresses and contact forms so that they now arrive in my Gmail inbox. Previously I’d use Mail.app (mac) to fetch email from 5 different email addresses and synced it with Mac.com using IMAP so I could retrieve it from two computers. Now I’m using Gmail online rather than a client to sort them all. It does mean I can only access email while online – but I think this in itself will be helpful as it decreases the time I am using email.

Darren goes on to talk about his other steps – including merciless unsubscribing, using Gmail’s filtering and labels, and other steps. It’s well worth the read if you’re looking to get control of your inbox.