Flagged

• Productivity Guru Merlin Mann, owner of the 43 Folders productivity website, recommends setting up a smart mailbox for flagged emails. Most email clients include a feature that allows you to flag emails that are important and you want to come back to at a later date. If your client doesn't have a mailbox dedicated to viewing flagged emails, creating one may be a smart idea for quickly getting at the emails you intended to answer later.
  
  

Read Later

• Many servers and clients do a reasonably good job of separating the junk mail that you don't want from the mail you do want. However, they are less helpful at sorting the mail you must read now from the mail you can get around to later. Solve this by creating a "read later" smart mailbox that's designed to filter out newsletters, mailing groups, and common notifications that you do indeed want to read, but that you don't want mixed in with more critical emails relating to your business or work. However, this smart mailbox does require that you take the hard step of deciding, in advance, which emails can wait for later and which can't. That decision will be very personal, but social network site notifications, blog notifications, and automated newsletters may be good places to start.
  
  

Attachments

• Depending on your client, you can create a smart mailbox solely for emails that contain attachments. This box can serve a variety of purposes: it can provide you with a fast way to find those photos that a relative mailed you two or three weeks ago without digging through pages of other emails, but it can also provide you with a handy, fast way to save disk space. An ordinary email takes up only a few kilobytes of space, but images (especially in advertisements) are added that can go up to megabytes. By creating a smart mailbox that contains all the emails that came with attachments, you can also quickly delete all the emails that came with attachments. After months or years of mail accumulation, you might be surprised at just how much wasted space you can regain by creating this mail rule.
  
  

Old Mail

• Finally, you can create a smart mailbox to collect all the messages that are older than a few months or a year. By doing this and keeping it sorted by sender, you have a fast and easy way to identify what you want to keep, and what you no longer need, and delete them.