cleaning the litterbox

So, I have about 3000 emails in my inbox. I do a clean-up every few days but there's tons of just I keep because "I'll get to it later". So after doing my regular partial clean-up, I just turned the tables on my inbox: I've started from the end.

I had some 2009 and 2010 emails, but I went through those quickly. (I'm still keeping a few, but now they're not buried in as much crap. I still want to read the Monthly Review article on the implosion of ex-yugoslavia, for example.) Now I'm in late 2011. I load an index page with 100 emails, select obvious mailing list crap, delete. Then I do a second pass on the personal emails I kept. It's pretty fast. 200 emails gone already. I now get less than 20 emails a day so I should be able to catch up fast by cleaning from both ends. I am pleased.