The average number of emails the average user gets per week is 300. That means if you spend one minutes with each email you spend an entire hour per day just reading emails.
However if you are a heavy internet user you get more than 200 emails per day and maybe even more. This makes searching emails and locating information fast and easy a real pain in the back. Thanks to the latest tools you can make this task a lot easier just by reading and following this guide.
More than 50% of internet users use Hotmail as their primary and only email address. I got nothing against Microsoft even if they can only make a slow and buggy email service, but hotmail is the worst email service out there. You can't search emails properly, the interface is very slow and has a lot of advertisements even at the and of the message. Unless you want to pay for it you can't forward the email to outlook or thunderbird which makes the service even worse. If you are using Hotmail just switch it immediately.
Yahoo users should switch as well as there are much better services out there. Gmail is the best one at the moment. Only useful text advertisements and very fast and light.
Now you have the right email service but how can you search the email efficiently because you only have so few minutes in your busy day?
First of all forget about searching your email online. Even Gmail is terribly slow in this particular feature. Instead you can use Google Desktop to index and search all your email as fast as you can type. I find this the best way to retrieve any email you want immediately. You can even preview and open your email inside Google desktop without needing to load the Ajax Gmail application.
However if you have Windows Vista in your machine you can forget about it. Vista is buggy with Google Desktop and will only say you don't have results after indexing the mail. Reinstalling it does not make any difference. You can use either thunderbird or windows live mail. Thunderbird is better in my opinion but be careful because is skips some emails sometimes. The only good thing thunderbird has is the search as fast as you type feature.
Michelle