In-box heck

There was a time when I had my in box(es) totally under control. Stuff got filtered. I either deleted messages, replied to them, or saved them if they really needed saving. Then blogging helped, because it provides a way to directly deal with any information that comes into my box and deserves immediate public comment or should be passed along as is to some specific audience (that’s what x-pollination is all about, to me).
But as I blog more it seems that I attend to my e-mail less. Between blogged items, to-do list items, and e-mail messages related to some action I intend to take, e-mail always seems to fall to the bottom of the pile. Then there’s the problem of the in-box getting too full and “urgent” messages scrolling off the screen.
Today I sorted all my “highest priority” messages and found 201 that at least at one point I felt needed immediate attention or were important enough that I thought I’d need to find them easily at a later point (usually conveying some key piece of information or instructions for some complicated technical process I wanted to do without fully understanding).
Some of them have clearly expired and I can take off the priority label and even delete them. Others still require my attention. I dealt with the oldest one just now. It was dated January 17, 2002, which is right around the time I started my bodega blog, coincidentally.