Working with a client to implement our "24 and Out" email best practice, we found a couple thousand emails in their inbox. At the end of the clean-up only 12 were left - 12 that had arrived that morning.

It's interesting that they had almost 30 subscriptions to various news feeds, groups, sites, stores, networks, and services. Those subscriptions were the majority of the "junk" in their inbox.

Another client in a Fortune 200 company had severe inbox overload. Turns out that they had subscribed to a document service that sent them an email when anyone changed any of the thousands of documents in the repository.

In both cases, these people were not as much overwhelmed by relevant email as they were by "personal spam" that they had asked to receive. Neither person spent time with that chaff and in both cases the overwhelming junk in their inbox was hiding important email.

Is much of your inbox consumed by messages you requested but don't read? Then take a few minutes now to unsubscribe and save hours of inbox distraction later.