1. Its not that hard to get to zero if you know the keyboard shortcuts to Gmail: use 'J' and 'K' to move between messages and 'Y' to archive. If you're in list

1. Its not that hard to get to zero if you know the keyboard shortcuts to Gmail: use 'J' and 'K' to move between messages and 'Y' to archive. If you're in list view, 'X' highlights the message so 'XY' will archive things very very quickly. 2. Liberal use of autoarchive for high volume mailing lists that I don't need to be continuously updated on. I'll clear those folders out every once in a while. 3. Boomerang is a great tool that lets you temporarily archive a message. It will come back to the Inbox when you tell it to, so you can put stuff you don't have to act on for a while away and stay near zero with it: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ (I am not affiliated with Boomerang.)