In an extract from Fast Company in a piece about “Email is Dead” it outlines some interesting ideas for controlling your email.

Remember when a new email in your inbox was as exciting as the postman dropping off a card from grandma with a $5 bill in it? Those days are over. Now email is a crushing tsunami.

The average corporate email account receives 18 MB of mail and attachments each business day, according to the analyst firm Radicati Group; the figure is projected to grow to 28 MB a day by 2011.

The tricks for managing email and ensuring that it gets read are easy:

• Write stronger subject lines help recipients better understand why they received an email and make it easier to search for in the future. (Instead of “Here’s what you asked for” as a heading, the class encourages specifics such as “Delivery: 2008 staffing model for small-business unit.”)
•  Sculpting the body text matters, too: Using bullet points and underlining or bolding text make messages more clear and concise.
• Use IM to initiate conversation rather than writing a poor email
• Pick up the phone.

While this may not stop you from receiving thousands of emails each day, it may help in raising the quality of emails and make it easier to find what you are looking for.