I get a lot of email.  Probably 50 a day minimum that I actually need to read.  The problem is those are sprinkled in over 700 emails that come to me at my various addresses.  That means that under 10% of my mail is actually the stuff I’m looking for.

Gmail (for my personal stuff) keeps up fairly well. Relatively few false positives (where something important gets delivered to the spam bucket).  The corporate email is a nightmare.  I currently have 1596 in my junk folder, 441 in another spam folder, and 478 in my suspect folder.  This after I cleaned it out on Friday.  In the past I’ve crashed my machine when deleting the email – frequently.

Why complain now?  It’s gotten to the point that with both SpamBayes and the corporate filter, plus my local rules, I’m filtering out close to 80% of my mail.  That means I’m getting more and more stuff sent to the wrong folder.  In fact I missed an important meeting this morning because a whole thread of email had gone to spam.

I’m an old school kind of webmaster – that means that I have webmaster@ email addresses for the domains I am responsible for.  Valueable stuff comes to those accounts.

In the future, my email will only get worse. The “real” stuff will become a smaller subset of the stuff getting pushed through and I can expect more lost opportunity due to important messages getting trashed. 

I’d be glad to hear ideas on this.  I’m fresh out, but for the first time, I can see a day when I turn off the corporate email or send it all to gmail and let Google sort it out.