Mr. Rojas.

Peter Rojas is co-founder of gdgt, a reviews and Q&A site for consumer electronics. Previously, he was the founding editor of Gizmodo and Engadget. This post originally appeared on his personal blog.

About three or four years ago I resolved to get my inbox under control— like most people I was having a tough time keeping up with everything—and after a few weeks I was able to get there. Here’s what I do to stay on top of my inbox (and apologies if these are just completely obvious things to do).

1. Use Gmail

I know this isn’t an option for everyone and that there are plenty of people who don’t like Gmail, but switching from a POP3 client (I used to Thunderbird) to a cloud-based system was a big help for me. Seriously, before I used Gmail everything was mess. I couldn’t keep things in sync and I had a huge backlog of unanswered messages. Gmail’s system of threading and starring messages took a little while to get used to, but now I find it indispensable. Plus I can access my email on multiple devices without having to worry about keeping everything in sync. It’s something we take for granted now, but it’s hard to remember just how difficult this was for most people.

2. Don’t leave any messages unread

When you go through your inbox, delete everything that isn’t important right away. Don’t let anything sit unread, even if you already know whether you’re going to delete it or respond to it. Seriously, don’t do it.

3. Then either reply, archive, or star

Once you’ve deleted everything that’s not important, you need to either: reply to anything that needs an immediate response (or that can be responded to quickly), archive anything that doesn’t need a response but that you do want to file away somewhere, and star anything that you can deal with later.

4. If you can, take your time getting back to people

Email begets email, so unless you really need to get back to someone right away, feel free to just star their message and get back to them later. Otherwise they’re just going to reply to your response and then you’re right back where you started. That star is your reminder to yourself to deal with it later, so unless it’s urgent, don’t feel bad about getting to it when you can. It’s OK to have up to a couple dozen emails in your starred folder.

5. Use your phone to keep an eye on your email—but don’t obsess over writing back from your phone

I’ve been using my phone for email ever since I bought my first Treo in 2003, but I try not to write many emails from my phone. Rather then tap out messages on my phone, I use it mainly to process emails that come in whenever I’m out and about. Unless there’s something that requires an immediate answer, I’ll star anything that needs a reply and then hit them when I’m back at a computer and can more efficiently crank them out. Sure, there are times I’ll be in a cab with nothing to do and so I’ll hit a few messages, but unless you have some downtime you’re probably better off saving all those responses for when you’re at a PC and can write them more quickly.

6. Try to minimize how much noise hits your inbox

This is easier said than done, right? I don’t use Priority Inbox—I don’t trust an algorithm to make filter properly—so instead I try and eliminate emails that I know aren’t going to be important from hitting my inbox in the first place. Most people underestimate how much noise makes it into their inbox each day. Here’s my rule: If you find yourself deleting a recurring newsletter or notification or whatever from someone without reading it more than a two or three times in a row, either unsubscribe or create a filter that routes those emails out of your inbox and into the trash. It seems easy to just manually delete all those emails as they come in, but you’ll be less overwhelmed by your email if you just suck it up and keep them out of your inbox altogether.

7. Create filters

Part of minimizing that noise is creating filters for messages you want, but that aren’t super important. I don’t mind getting Fab.com and LivingSocial-type emails, but I don’t want them inundating my inbox, so I have a folder just for those that I filter all of those into. Same thing with notifications from any social network I’ve joined or email list I’m on that I don’t want to leave but also don’t want to be distracted by. Again, it’s easy to just delete stuff as it comes in, but we underestimate the cognitive burden that accumulates from doing that. Taking 20 seconds to create a filter is a pain, but they’re a small investment in lessening your inbox overload.

Anyway, I know everyone’s situation is different, so I’m not going to pretend I’ve developed some universally perfect system, but I thought others might find it useful to hear what I did. It’s definitely worked for me.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

Mr. Didier.

Eric Didier is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of ividence, a technology startup that applies the type of behavioral targeting used in retention emails to the email acquisition market.

As an entrepreneur, husband, father to three (wonderful!) children, and active member in a number of groups and associations, I get a lot of email. As do many of you.

At ividence, we send customer acquisition emails to records who have opted in to hear about special offers. Knowing how quickly our inboxes get overloaded, ividence operates on the principle that email is only valuable to people who want it.

But even emails you want—from friends, family, colleagues and companies—can quickly overwhelm. These are the tips and tricks I use to make my inbox a saner place.

Plus addressing = more email addresses
Gmail addresses can be customized to track projects or types of emails. Say your email address is john.doe@gmail.com. You can use john.doe+vendorapps@gmail.com for vendor application forms and john.doe+newsletters@gmail.com for newsletters. Each goes to the same inbox, and then you can use filters to organize incoming emails.

You’ll also know if a company sold your email without telling you. If a + address is burned by being sold, create a filter to send emails received at john.doe+naughtycompany@gmail.com straight to the trash. So there’s no need to change your 10-year-old address just because of a spammer. (If a website won’t accept the + sign in your address, that’s a bad sign.)

If it doesn’t belong in email, don’t email it
Some communication doesn’t work through email. At ividence, we use Google Docs for collaborative documents. Rather than sending dozens of emails tracking changes, everyone reviews and updates in one place. For collaboration, email is bulky, slow, and plagued with versioning issues. Save time and just don’t do it.

Put email in its place
We use Google Apps for work email. The beauty of filtering is its association with labels, which become folders in Outlook and on my iPhone. Thanks to Google Apps for Outlook (yes, I still use it!) and iPhone, everything gets synchronized and organized in real time. I no longer receive emails multiple times on different devices, and I know where emails are when I need them.

How you know and who you know
Are you a LinkedIn addict for your day-to-day tasks? Rapportive is a plugin that shows you the LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter profile of your correspondent... whether you know them already or not. It’s useful to:

• Make a connection with a new contact.
• Remember how you know people you haven’t written recently.
• Add your own notes for each contact.

All these practices give me some freedom from the inbox, and every moment not spent on email is one I can spend with my family.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

Le email!

French enterprise IT firm Atos has banned employees from sending emails to each other, ABC News reports, in an amazing blow in the battle against email. CEO Thierry Breton, who was the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, apparently loathes the stuff, claiming just 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive a day are useful and 18 percent are spam. Mr. Breton told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in three years.

Atos employees now have 18 months to wean themselves off email, using instant messaging and a "Facebook-style interface," instead. Employees have reportedly already succeeded in cutting email bloat by 20 percent in six months.

How much do we love this company? And how much do we love their Twitter? This much, we tell you. Side note: Computer Weekly just awarded the Atos CIO Agenda blog, which features topics such as "How to win when you don’t know the rules," the "2011 CIO blogger of the year" designation. Congratulations on your lifestyle change, Atos.

Mr. Holmes.

Chris Holmes is the founder and CEO of Meshin, on a mission to bring the world a contextually unified, prioritized view of the people and information that matter most, so they can better understand what takes priority and bring them to action.

Mr. Tancredi.

Tom Tancredi is the cofounder of DOM & TOM INC., a digital studio based in New York City, focusing on web and mobile development serving clients such as Hearst Digital Media, Scholastic Books and Priceline.com. Feel free to reach Tom at tom@domandtom.com.

Subject lines are crucial. I get over 150 emails a day. Multiple that over a year, and it comes out to tens of thousands of email [about 54,000 —ed]. In order to find an email about a particular project, we made it a process that people write the client, the project name and (if possible), the date, in the subject line. Emails with subjects like "on second thought..." or "here's that update" are lost in the void of back-and-forth.

Pay for the email upgrades. In the back-and-forth with clients, they'll send, re-send, re-re-send versions of the same files over again. Raw photos, footage, etc will EAT your storage capacity immediately, making it impossible to receive/send emails. Upping your storage costs next-to-nothing ($20 - $50 for additional 20GBs) and it'll make for easy access to important docs.

Emails are no replacement for in-person or on-the-phone discussions. I love the opportunity to take the time to write out a lengthy email, itemizing all the points and subjects. And sometimes that's necessary. But nothing replaces the real-time "back and forth" with clients that you get with in-person meetings or conference calls. No one wants to read a 30-page email thread. No. One.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

Mr. Capel.

This is a guest post from Neil Capel, CEO of Sailthru, a New York-based startup that automatically tailors email, web and advertising content to the unique user.

I’ve always abided by the InboxZero principles: delete, delegate, respond, defer, and do. Anyone who has ever abided by these principle knows, though, that it’s becoming impossible to maintain. I barely have enough time to open all my emails, let alone categorize them. Time is valuable and because of that I default to the fastest action: deletion. I delete even faster when the email is from a brand that has repeatedly sent things that aren’t relevant to me.

It’s not that I don’t want to engage with brands. I’ll willingly admit that I’m a sucker for free shipping offers and a good discount. I’m signed up for more retail and content sites than I care to admit. But why do I receive email deals for pedicures on a daily deal site? And why do I keep getting updates about Kim Kardashian’s love life when I’ve neve rclicked on an article about her? (Okay, maybe once.)

Why? Because brands don’t respect me, my time or my inbox—at least that’s how it feels. I know the reality is different. Many brands think the more emails they send, the more money they make. And, to a certain extent, they’re right. Email has always been leveraged as a cos- effective and high ROI, direct response channel. But truth be told, in this socially-focused day and age, more mass emails means more opt-outs and trips to the SPAM folder. It means losing a key channel with which to communicate withcustomers. It means losing me, my trust and my business.

So I did the thing any serial entrepreneur would do. I created a business to help brandsbe relevant in a consumer’s inbox, on site, in app, and in ads through hyper-personalized, 1:1 content. The whole premise of Sailthru is that we help an e-tailer to know that I prefer to shop on my iPad and that I generally buy gifts for my wife, and that you like to buy sports equipment and read articles about skiing—and respond to both our unique interests accordingly.

Sending pertinent email deals, as well as serving good content recommendations onsite, in apps or in ads all create more engaged, loyal customers, build trust and tell the user that you respect them and their time. It’s that simple.

My delete finger is tired. But clearing email inboxes is a game for consumers andbrands alike. All consumers should adopt an email philosophy whether it’s InboxZero, a priority inbox or something else in order to keep up with ever-growing inboxes. The best brands will help them with this daunting task. And their customers or subscribers will recognize them for it with their clicks, page views and purchases. And I’ll finally feel like my inbox has gotten some respect.

Mr. Taneja.

Pankaj Taneja is the marketing dude at HyperOffice, a pioneer in cloud collaboration since 1998. Apart from others things, one of the missions of his life is to help people get over their email addiction.

Much of our email overload consists of newsletters we signed up for in eras gone by, unsolicited mails from sales people promising to change our lives for ever and ever, desperate pleas for help, promises to share inheritance or increase our “endowments,” and notifications from the umpteen social networks we are part of. And we revel in whining about it to no end.

But we business users have less of an excuse. Corporate filters are increasingly efficient in catching and incinerating email of the above kind. Yet we face email overload nonetheless. Research finds that the typical corporate worker sent and received close to 110 emails per day and we spend half of our work day dealing with this information barrage from email and other sources. So what does this bloated inbox consist of?

Look closely.
How many of emails have the merry queue of RE:RE:RE:RE.. as a subject line? Look even closer. How many of these emails can be put in one of the following categories--a discussion, a task you delegated to others or vice versa, a document you are collaborating on with others, or everyone trying to coordinate a meeting?

Notice that none of the above qualify as one-to-one communication, for which email was mainly designed. Heck, it is not even one to many. It is many-to-many, where everyone needs to interact with everyone else. And many-to-many communication is collaboration.

As soon as you try to employ email for many-to-many interactions, hell breaks loose--exponentially. Consider the following all-too-familiar situation, and keep the email counter running. You send an email to two people to finalize a meeting time. One says yes, the other requests a reschedule. You reply to all, suggesting a new time. The new proposed time is unfortunately not suitable for the first person. Another set of responses, another reply to all for a reschedule. Finally everyone responds agreeing on a time. If you have been counting, the whole thread added nine emails to your inbox. And this was just three people.

This is what James Gaskin has called the “law of meeting coordination:”

V = P²

where the number of potential emails going back and forth is the square of participants in the thread. The law is equally applicable to a more complex situation like using email for working together on a document, where people are more likely to have disagreements and the document is going to fly back and forth multiple times. What to speak of the hassle of making sure that everyone is working off the latest version.

Ironically, there are tools which have been designed for these specific tasks. Information tools designed for “many to many” interactions--collaboration tools--online calendars for scheduling, project management for task delegation, document management for working together on documents, and discussion forums for discussions. And businesses are increasingly accepting collaboration tools as the next generation information management software, given the continuing growth of this market. At a conceptual level, rather than pushing duplicate copies of data back and forth (think a document attachment), everyone accesses and works off a common instance of data (think everyone accessing and working on a document in a shared online folder). Here, people are “pulled” to the data as opposed to it being “pushed” to everyone.

So we have the tools to combat a big chunk of this email overload, and also enjoy other vaunted organizational and productivity benefits of collaboration tools. However, email persists, while many email killers die and are forgotten. We have to acknowledge that getting rid of email is equally a behavioral problem, as a technological problem. Ancient tool as it is, its simplicity and familiarity simply has us addicted. Email users have to be cajoled, trained and even coerced to wean them off email. Our approach is that our HyperOffice Collaboration Suite includes collaboration tools fully integrated with email. The fact that collaboration tools are part of the same console as email reduces barriers to adoption. Contextual integration, like the email-to-tasks button which converts emails into tasks further helps.

Hopefully, the day will come when email will matter to us less and less, and horrifying reply to all stories will be a thing of the past.

Mr. Harrison.

Greg Harrison is an avid traveler, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner and entrepreneur.  As the co-founder of MailSlayer.com, his goal is to make the process of writing, organizing and sending emails more efficient, so you can spend more time doing the things you love.

I have read a lot of the articles about how to clean up and manage your inbox and they have all said to read the important messages, and get rid of the rest. But what happens when every email is important?

If you provide email customer support, you can't just archive your customers' email or you'll likely forget about them and may lose them forever. Worse, that forgotten customer will go on to speak poorly about you to all of their friends, family and anyone who will listen making you lose out on potential revenue later. Answering every single one of your customers' emails is of critical importance to your business, and to make things tougher, great customer service these days is built on the expectation that inquiries will be answered within a reasonable amount of time, the sooner, the better.

I have been in charge of customer experience for the last three startups I have worked with and they all have used Gmail as their customer support inbox (I've seen an increase in the use of Gmail as the platform for email support). So, how could a team of only two people reply to 150-300 customer inquiries within 24 hours only using Gmail? The following is a quick workflow we created to slay email customer support.

Setting up:

First off, you should dedicate one email address as your customer service email, for example info@company.com, and allow everyone that answers those types of emails access to that single account. This simplifies your workflow and helps you stay organized as your company grows.

To start, we want to know how many emails we need to tackle. To do this, I suggest archiving all emails that have been answered and that have no further actions or follow up left to do. The inbox should only be for unresolved emails, while archiving all fully resolved emails. I would also suggest going in to your Gmail settings and selecting "show 100 conversations per page" so you spend less time flipping through pages of emails.

Then we want to set up the “Send & Archive” plug-in in Google labs. This adds an additional button to all of your emails that lets you automatically archive emails once you click send.

Next, lets add an “Important” label and a “Follow Up” label.

You will also want to add an "Assigned to" label for each person who is managing the inbox, for example “Assigned to Greg.” At first it may be just you, or you and your co-founder but as you grow, you will want to ensure you are keeping track of who is sending what.

Now let's set up some template responses. Although I recommend using MailSlayer's Snippets App, Google Labs also offers a free canned response tool that you can activate in the Labs setting of your Gmail.

Canned responses are a great way to cut down the time it takes to write emails. It also allows you to add rich text such as links, images and formatting quickly, all of which greatly assist your customer to resolving their issue or finding the information they need. If your website already has an FAQ page, you can add a link to your FAQ to your canned responses.

While the word “Canned Responses” has a negative stereotype, let's face the facts: when it comes to customer service, nine out of 10 questions you are receiving have already been answered before. The good news is, you can always take time to personalize each email if necessary.

Putting it in action!

Now that we have our inbox set up and ready to go, let's walk through the typical workflow when answering emails.

The FIFO (first in/ first out) rule comes into play when answering customer support emails, so click to the back of the list (the emails you received the longest time ago) and work from the bottom up.

Click on the email and immediately drag your “assigned to” label to the email. This means you have now claimed ownership of this email and are responsible for answering it. Doing this will also help you find emails you were working on (in case you run into any distractions while answering an email).

Read the entire email first, this is important as a lot of people will read until the first question and then answer it as fast as possible and miss other important questions. 

Once you have read the email, use the snippets/canned responses if you can to quickly answer the questions in the email and then add any additional information needed. If you need to follow up with this person, drag the “follow up” label to the email and if it has important information about the person also drag the “important” label to the email.

Adding these labels makes it easy to constantly list who you need to follow up with and what emails had important information when you need to find their emails again.

Using your favourite CRM (I suggest MailSlayer's Notes) add any new notes about the customer that can help you with future communications and also summarize any problems the person had as well as the actions taken from this conversation.

Keeping notes saves you a ton of time. Think about it, if a customer emails you about a problem and you have a few email exchanges back and forth and then 3 months later they write back with a cryptic message saying “The problem happened again”, you will be able to easily review your conversation notes instead of reading through multiple emails to figure out what the problem was to begin with. Notes alone will save you hours of time when answering emails!

Now that you have answered the email, spell check and double check to make sure you have answered all questions (if you didn't that means the person will need to send another email to you, a sign of poor customer support).

Now Send and Archive the email and you are ready for the next email.

This workflow has saved me and my co-workers hours of time when answering emails and it's an extremely easy one to implement into your own workflow.

I started MailSlayer because I found that there are a lot of great apps out there to help you with answering your emails, however, many of them force you to counter-intuitively leave your email workflow to use them. MailSlayer is an app platform that plugs in to Gmail and adds powerful apps like Notes, Snippets and Labels directly to your Gmail workflow, all of which are combined to help you write, organize and send emails faster.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

(Oliver Munday)

KELLY CUTRONE GETS ABOUT 625 EMAILS A DAY, she told Betabeat last week. The fashion publicist, book author and reality show star spends her frequent flights to L.A. slashing through notifications from Twitter and party promoters, missives from clients and employees of her P.R. agency People’s Revolution, and communiqués related to her various television gigs. “I also have two BlackBerrys and two email addresses and they all forward shit everywhere, so sometimes I get the same email four times,” she said. “I sometimes contemplate how much time I spend deleting junk emails, and how I’ll be thinking that when I’m on my deathbed, like how many hours or days that will eventually add up to, and it’ll sort of just make me want to kill myself while I’m dying.

“I really am haunted,” she added. “Like this is like a really big part of my life.”

Around December 1964, researchers at the MIT Computation Center sent a memo to the programming staff. “A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private message to another user which may be delivered at the receiver’s convenience,” the note read. Flash forward 45 years, and our inboxes are flooded. Expedia has a 24-hour travel deal. The New Yorker would like you to renew your subscription. Your friend is writing with tears in her eyes that she’s in Paris and has been robbed and would you please send money. Facebook wants you to know that someone liked something you wrote a week ago. Your cousin sent the extended family a link to a video of an a cappella group rapping about Hanukkah.

Those who work in media are especially saturated. Danica Lo, who recently left the fashion blog Racked for a job at Glamour, said she purges her inbox three or four times a year. “After this past Fashion Week, I think I had about 9,000 unread messages,” she said. “And I’m not going to read them. Like, there’s no way, if I want to get on with my life. I went in after fashion week and I selected all unread messages and I just deleted them. I started doing that when I was at The New York Post because it would just fill up and it would just start rejecting people’s emails. It’s hard because every time I do that I probably delete like eight to ten really important emails, but it’s impossible, actually now, to go through and make sure.”

Ms. Lo got her first email account when she was a student at Dartmouth, which had one of the earliest email systems. It was called BlitzMail, and it became immensely popular. “At college none of us would use a phone, we would all just Blitz each other,” she said. “But the email load was nothing like it is now.”

She estimates she gets about 600 pieces a day, mostly pitches from publicists. Her strategy is to read and answer all the important messages as they come in. “I look at the subject line, I look at the person,” she said. “The subject line is the most important thing. Most of the time it will not be relevant to me at all. I get a lot of food pitches and a lot of general entertainment pitches. I just leave them unread. But I try to read all the ones from people I know or news things—like breaking news, anything like that, any really fashion-y press releases. And then I’ll read beauty product releases, that’s probably like my like B-list of what I’m reading every day, because beauty tends not to be super urgent but it’s really fun.”

The never-ending deluge means she’s on email all day—“I’m not one of those people who checks their email twice a day,” she said, as if speaking about some coveted but unaffordable luxury—though she expects she’ll get a break after she starts the new job. “But after about six months everyone finds you again,” she said. “Especially since Condé Nast emails are so easy. Everyone has the same format so it’s easy to guess.”

Not everyone gets 600 emails a day. But email overload affects a large swath of the online population, especially those working in the “knowledge economy.” And even as certain types of messages are siphoned off into networks like Facebook and Twitter, the volume of email is still growing. Facebook and Twitter will email you, for example, if you get a private message on their networks—an email to let you know you have email.

The email problem has captivated the tech world for years, but the discussion is zeitgeisting along with the social media revolution.

Peek Behind The Curtain of VC Funding With Our First Original Web - The Pitch

“I’ve taken to saying, ‘Email is our personal to-do list that anybody adds to,’” L.A.-based venture capitalist Mark Suster wrote earlier this month. In May the local venture capitalist Fred Wilson found himself staring at an inbox of 800 unread emails and declared email bankruptcy. Rather than go through the pile, he asked people he hadn’t responded to email him again. The growing number of tech investors facing metastasizing inboxes has resulted in the funding of a crop of startups aiming to “fix email.”

Joe West and Julian Gutman, 20-something techies working out of the Flatiron startup hub General Assembly, plan to nix the inbox. “Email is where the phrase ‘information overload’ was invented,” Mr. West said, explaining that Microsoft did some of the seminal research on email and popularized that phrase in the late 90s. “The pain that people experience from information overload is acute because everything comes into this inbox, everything comes into this one place,” he said.

What started as a simple medium has gotten jammed up with uses that no one foresaw when it was invented, he said.

Mr. West and Mr. Gutman are still struggling to come up with a name for the inbox-less thing they’ve been building for six months, but it will display messages in a more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing format based on whether the message is text, photos, a newsletter, and so on, they said, and eliminate threaded conversations and provide “context” for each message.

The entrepreneurs are hoping to release a reasonably polished version within two months. It has to be polished, Mr. West said, because people are highly sensitive when it comes to their email. “If you give people the impression that you’ve lost their email, they will try and stab you,” he said.

There are now scores of such proposals, such as OtherInbox, which automatically grabs emails from newsletters, shopping sites and social networks and shuffles them into their own folders for easy mass deletion, and Paris-based Kwaga, which is developing an application that reads your email and extracts key information using natural language processing.

10 Startups Tackling Email Overload [SLIDESHOW]

Mountain View, Ca.-based Baydin makes the Email Game, which awards points for getting rid of emails within three minutes and subtracts points for exceeding the time limit. Baydin also makes Boomerang, a tool that allows users to schedule emails to send at a later date or have incoming emails disappear and then bounce back into the inbox at a specific time—a tool some of the more tech-savvy emailers use to tame their inboxes. “It’s mostly ‘saved by the Boomerang,’” Brooklyn-based tech publicist Mallory Blair told Betabeat in an email about her “email practice.”

But without electronic stamps, the core problem remains: email is much easier to send than it is to respond to. “I don’t mind getting email,” said Eric Kuo, a 27-year old political operative and student at Columbia University. “I think it’s the official way to communicate.”  Mr. Kuo said he is getting more email now than ever before, 100 a day between three addresses. “I probably add to my friends’ email problems because if I come across something interesting, I’ll often shoot it to a bunch of friends in an email,” he said.

Blasting interesting things to friends doesn’t sound so nefarious. But the cavalier sender is part of the problem, according to Chris Anderson, the New York-based founder of the popular TED conference who recently penned an editorial in the Washington Post on email overload.

“My gut is it won’t be solved technically, that at core it’s a social question,” Mr. Anderson said. He estimates he receives 200 or 300 non-junk emails a day, with usually about 150 of them unread. To deal with them, he employs a “scribe,” his assistant Jane Wulf. “By the way, I think that is a job of the future—the scribe,” he said. “The secretary is no more.”

Mr. Anderson and Ms. Wulf developed in July an “Email Charter,” a list of ten rules intended to reduce the overall volume of email, including “Short or slow is not rude” and “Ending a note with ‘no need to respond’ or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity.” The charter, also the subject of his recent editorial, struck a chord, Mr. Anderson said. He pointed out that the charter was retweeted 7,000 times and recevied 12,000 likes on Facebook. It can be viewed and “signed” at emailcharter.org. “A lot of people out there feel that this is a big problem and are wrestling with how to do deal with it,” Mr. Anderson said. “The monster is still bigger than me, bigger than all of us.”

ajeffries@observer.com

Overloaded on email? Check out Betabeat's new series, Inbox Heroes, with tips from techies on how to deal, or click over to this slideshow of 10 Startups Tackling Email Overload.

Email! There is now so much of it, and more is being created all the time. It's always open in a tab; it's on our phones. Fortunately, VCs are having the same problem--and they're throwing money at it. Check out these 10 startups trying to fix email.