I have used the same Gmail address as my main email for over 5 years. Since then:

• I've made dozens of other emails that forward to this address.
• I've signed up for hundreds of web apps and newsletters.

As a result, my Gmail account gets inundated with email. Here are the stats:

• 16,054 unread emails in my inbox
• 29,236 emails total in my inbox
• ?? who knows how many total emails in my archive
• 3.683 GB of email
• Using 49% of my Gmail quota

My Gmail account had become a firehose.

This was bad for two reasons.

First, I started missing important emails. Not many, but a few per month. I had to write my own simple Bayes filter to find them.

Second, I couldn't do what most people do: use my inbox as a "todo" list. Most people immediately archive or delete an email when they're done with it. This is a great organizational trick. I wanted to do this again.

I considered starting a new email address and giving it out to important people, but that seemed like it would make my life more complex.

As it turns out, the solution was simple.

• Started liberally using the "Spam" button. I started clicking Spam on pretty much any type of mass email that wasn't very interesting to me. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
• Starred all the recent messages that I still had to deal with.
• Archived all 29,000+ of my gmail messages at once.
• Went back to the starred folder and moved the important messages to inbox.