In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.

I first wrote about this three-folder system on Lifehacker back in 2006 as a riff on Merlin Mann's five-folder system, which he published in Macworld in 2005. Of course, Merlin went on to be the king of Inbox Zero (book forthcoming!). For a much longer--and much funnier and in-depth--video on using email well, check out Merlin's hour-long Google talk about it.

I've been using this system to organize my email since I wrote the original article back in 2006, and I've found it's an absolute sanity-saver. At this point it's so ingrained in my workflow I barely think about it. Though I must admit: some weeks I'm better about it than others. This week I'm on book deadline, and I do have about 40 messages that need to be processed sitting in my inbox right now.

This video segment is the first thing I've ever shot in a studio with a backdrop, lighting, a director, sound guy, two cameras, makeup artist, and an actual script. Besides that weird thing my hair is doing, I'm so pleased to see what came out of what felt like 600 takes. Our editor and animation artist, Adam Barenblat, did an incredible job of turning a dry, boring, "create this folder and name it this" subject into something really fun to watch. Thanks a whole lot to FastCompany.com for having me, and for the crew at Magic Bullet Media for turning out something so cool. There will be a new video every week for the next few months at FastCompany.com, and I'll post about each new one as it gets released here as well.

If video's not your thing, here's the transcript of the segment.

As always, your preferred email processing system depends on your situation. As a freelancer who doesn't use Outlook, rarely gets meeting invitations, and almost always gets messages from outside my non-company, this strategy doesn't work as well for me, but for a nine-to-fiver inside a corporate firewall, it makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks, Scott!

The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail [Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen]

There are two main advantages to using Google Apps (for your domain). 1.) You can easily create other users at your domain. If my email is gina@example.com, and I'm the domain administrator, I can set up addresses for my co-workers or softball team members too and make jack@example.com and jill@example.com accounts. Then everyone at my domain can collaborate on documents and a shared calendar easily. 2.) If you decide you don't like Gmail anymore? Just point your MX record to another host and you're done. Your email address never changes, like it would if you wanted to bail on your you@gmail.com address. Back when it used to be called "Google Apps for Your Domain", I explained more in detail how it works over at Lifehacker with some screenshots, then later at a post at HarvardBusiness.org. Check 'em out:

How to Make Your Small Business Look Big [HarvardBusiness.org]
Ask Lifehacker: What Does Google Apps for Your Domain Actually Do? [Lifehacker]

This week Gmail engineers added a richer contact interface for filling in the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields when you're composing a new email message. While address auto-completion has been available for some time now, the new Contact Chooser lets you check multiple recipients off a list. Click on the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: field names (which are now links) to try it out.

Click to enlarge the screenshot on the right to see this in action. You can search for contacts by keyword, or just show names in contact groups by choosing it from the drop-down. Then, check off all your recipients from the list and click the Done button to add those recipients to your message.

I still rely heavily on auto-complete as-you-type since I usually send email to one or two frequent contacts, but the chooser pop-up comes in handy when you've got a long list of folks to email and you need some help finding them in your contacts.

Microsoft shuts down Hotmail accounts that haven't been logged into after nine months. So if you registered for your Gmail account two years ago and used your Hotmail address as your secondary email address and never logged back in, you've put your Gmail account at risk.

Here's how: If your Hotmail account gets shut down due to inactivity, someone else can open a new one using your Hotmail address. Then, if that someone else requests a password reset from Gmail, it goes to that address, and that someone can get into your primary email account. This is how Twitter employees' Gmail accounts got broken into last week.

From Hotmail's help section:

Free Windows Live Hotmail accounts become inactive if you don't sign in for more than 270 days or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account. After an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted. Incoming messages will be sent back to the sender as undeliverable. Your account name is still reserved. However, if the account stays inactive for an additional 90 days, the account name may be permanently deleted.

In the comments of my post at Lifehacker this morning, a reader said that his wife's last emails from her father were lost in a shutdown Hotmail account.

If you are or ever were a Hotmail user, make sure all the important online accounts you use (banking, other email accounts, shopping sites where you've stored credit card information) don't send password reset messages to your Hotmail account, and that important messages aren't left there untouched for too long. Either that, or make absolutely sure you log in once every few months.

Update: My apologies for picking on Hotmail! Turns out Gmail and Yahoo Mail have similar deactivation policies. From Gmail's Help:

A dormant address is a Gmail address that hasn't been used for six months. You can still receive mail if your address is dormant, but you need to log in to keep your account active. If you don't log in to Gmail within three months of it being labeled dormant -- or for nine consecutive months -- Google may delete the address.

From Yahoo Mail's help:

Accounts are deactivated and removed after four months of no use. When an account is deactivated, you won't be able to access it, regardless of whether or not email has been received in the account during that time.
And sorry, but we can't retrieve any of the information that was formerly stored in it.

In summary, unlogged-into Hotmail and Gmail account expire after nine months and unlogged-into Yahoo accounts expire after six (unless you pay for Yahoo! Mail Plus). Looks like we all have to remember to log into those secondary webmail accounts.

Let's face it, if you only speak one language, most of the mail in your non-native tongue is likely spam. Imagine being able to create a filter that deletes, archives, or labels all messages that are -lang:English (not in English), or automatically marks any message that's lang:Russian as spam. Of course, this gets complicated if a message contains a few languages, but it would be a start to avoiding having to manually process messages that are obviously not meant for you.