Email usability: Best Practices for Microsoft Outlook 2007. Here are three things that I would like to mention to help manage email.
1) Set up a search folder and include many folders – inbox, rss feeds, mailing lists, Communicator conversations, etc. This will put all items you need to consider in one place.
2) Set up a rule to flag for follow up for all items. Use the 4 D's for handling email: Delete it, Do it (respond, take action, file), Delegate it (forward it), or Defer it. Once the email it taken care of, mark it complete.
3) Use sorting and searching to find items. You can click on the column headers to sort, then start typing the contents of the field and it will jump to those items. An even better way (but requiring more typing) is searching. Since our Exchange server indexes these items, searching is really fast. You can enter search terms in the format keyword:value to find items. For example, subject:"sql account" from:john, will find that email from John about that sql account. To find the available keywords, search for help on “narrow your search” to find the topic “Learn to narrow your search criteria for better searches in Outlook”. You can also search contacts and calendars. [more]
These ideas came from an article by Melissa MacBeth called Best Practices for Microsoft Outlook 2007, available at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA103715211033.aspx. This is a long article, but it has many good ideas.