周日晚上，吃罢晚饭，我家人都上楼了。我坐在餐桌旁，化了3个小时清理我的电子邮箱。刚一开始，我的邮箱上有1200多封未读的邮件。三个小时后，我把未读邮件降到了800封。我实在累极了，便上床睡觉，我决定邮箱破产了。

从4月初到5月的第一个星期，我邮箱中的未读邮件数量从一个可控的上百封达到无法应付的上千封。其中，并没有发生什么事件造成这样的局面，这对我来说是非常正常的。

我是我宣布邮箱破产的经过：我有一个大概30多人的、经常相互联系的邮箱清单。这些清单中的人都是我最重要的关系户。我使用两种网络服务（一个是Gist，一个是Etacts）来知道这些人是谁。两种服务都很有用。于是我使用Gmail来搜索这些人，以便确认我没有从他们那里收到未读的、也未归档的邮件。如果这些服务能自动为我的30多个地址进行这样的搜索就太棒了。当然，要是Gmail本身能内嵌这种服务自然就更好了。

有一次，我已确认我已经读完并回复了所有来自这30个最重要关系户的邮件。然后我进行了“全选”，并点击“归档”。这种感觉实在是令人爽极了。

如果你在过去5周里给我发过邮件，而我却没有回复，那我要说一声抱歉了。总共有800多封这样的邮件，你并是唯一的一个。如果你的邮件很重要，那请你再发一次吧。

很久了，读者们都知道我一直在与邮件抗争。我既恨它，可离了它又不成。我得到了上百个有关如何更加高效使用邮件的建议，而我也采纳了其中的很多条。但结果却是，我用得越有效，来的邮件却越多。

我的朋友Stu Roseman现正在破解另一个网络服务，以使得邮箱的使用更加容易些。我上周测试了一下。他可以看到我的邮件流量，还一度给我发了一个邮件，说：“你能处理这么多邮件，太令人佩服了。”

我并不令人佩服。我简直是痛苦，而且这种痛苦还没有止境。这就是邮件，这个导致我再次破产的东西。

Email Bankruptcy

On Sunday night I sat down at the dinner table after my family headed upstairs and I spent three hours cleaning out my email inbox. When I started I had over 1200 unread non-spam emails. Three hours later I had the number down to 800 and I was wiped out. I went to bed and decided to declare email bankruptcy.

From early April to the first week of May, the number of unread emails in my inbox grew from a manageable hundred to an unmanageable thousand. There wasn’t one event that precipitated this situation, it was a number of situations. This happens to me fairly regularly.

Here’s how I declare email bankruptcy: I have a list of about thirty people who I email with regularly and who are my most important email relationships. I use two web services, Gist and Etacts, to tell me who these people are. Both are useful. I then do gmail searches on their names and make sure that I have no unread and unarchived emails from them. It would be great if one or both of these services could auto-generate a gmail search on all thirty addresses for me. It would be even better if gmail had this feature built into the service.

Once I have made sure I’ve read and answered all emails from my thirty most important email relationships, I select all and hit archive. It is a tremendously satisfying feeling.

I am sorry if you sent me an email in the past five weeks and I did not respond. There are over 800 emails like that and so you are not alone. If it is important that I see your email, please email me again.