I'm sitting here with over 700 emails in my inbox, and I've been semi-offline for just a bit over a week. Something has got to give. I understand where a large chuck of my email activity comes from: my various volunteering roles and graphic design freelancing. But the amount of "junk" email that fills up my inbox is still vastly disproportional to the important emails. And by "junk" I don't litterally mean junk, I do have a filter for those emails. By junk I mean emails that are just clutter. It needs to be seen, but it also doesn't need to swamp my inbox so much so that it keeps me from reading the really important emails. Or simply feeling overwhelmed. Do you feel my pain?

So my question is: where is all my email coming from, and how can I interact and organize it in a way that is the most productive and the least frustrating?

The answer to the where part of that question is pretty straight forward. It comes in because it can. While the significant upside of convenience that the internet has brought to our lives, an equally significant downside is the flurry of "junk" or unsolicited email that it has created. Any transaction or point of interest you incur on the web requires you to provide your email address.