All of these tips are generalizations of the same idea: with email, nobody grabs your attention without your consent. This is a new idea in society - you could

All of these tips are generalizations of the same idea: with email, nobody grabs your attention without your consent. This is a new idea in society - you could always get someone's attention by finding them in person, and you could usually reach someone on the telephone. Call screeners and security guards are expensive, so only a few people had them. But now, I can just open up my GMail preferences and have my mail prioritized, flagged, tagged, deleted, and archived without lifting a finger. And malevolent emails are filtered out by someone else! At the end of the day, effectively dealing with email is like programming - when something sucks, automate it.