With so much of our communication arriving by e-mail, it is easy to fall victim to an overloaded inbox. But a mixture of tools and techniques can help you tame your inbox, as long as you’re willing to take time to prepare.

Here are four tips for effectively managing your e-mail:

> Declare E-mail Bankruptcy! Aside from important client e-mails, delete long-standing items from your inbox. If you haven’t dealt with an e-mail that has been sitting in your inbox for six weeks, you aren’t likely to.

“We keep a lot of stuff in our inboxes,” says Alykhan Jetha, CEO of Markham, Ont.-based Marketcircle Inc. , which makes Daylite, a Mac-based software tool that manages e-mail and contacts. “Once that happens, you start to lose stuff. One thing we stress to staff is to keep their inboxes empty; keep mail left there to a minimum.”

> Don’t Handle An E-mail More Than Once. As soon as you see it, deal with it, delegate it or make a task out of it, so that it disappears from your inbox.

In his best-selling organizational book Getting Things Done, author David Allen highlights a crucial rule for managing e-mail as well as other types of incoming work: deal with it once — and get it out of your “in” tray or inbox.

Adherents of this policy recommend setting a two-minutes limit on dealing with an incoming e-mail. Within that two minutes, you delete it or, if it requires more attention, route it to a context folder for follow-up action. For example, you might have a folder called “errands” that you would check before you go to Staples on an office supplies run, or a folder in a client’s name that you check before you visit him or her.

Another option is to make a task of the e-mail message. Vendors of e-mail software have been gradually building organizational tools into their software for years. Microsoft Outlook 2007, one of the most popular e-mail programs, has several features designed to simplify mail management; allowing users to convert e-mails into tasks in the system’s “to do” section is one of them.

In general, the ability to link e-mails to calendar dates, tasks and other elements of a personal information-management product can be a big boost to productivity.

“We provide the ability to click on a mail pertaining to some task you want to do, and then save it as something you need to do on a specific date,” says Elizabeth Caley, group product manager for office servers at Mississauga, Ont.-based Microsoft Canada Co. “Then you can manage that as a task in the calendar.”

On the Mac, the latest version of the native Mail that ships with OS X 10.5, the new operating system known as “Leopard,” offers other integration features. For example, it recognizes dates — including those implicit in phrases such as “next Tuesday” — and automatically adds the relevant message to the iCal scheduler application.

> Use Templates. They help process repetitive e-mails effectively.

Ideally, you will want to deal with as many e-mails as possible within the two-minute limit. Templates can be a useful means of accomplishing this. Many e-mails arriving in your inbox may be repetitive, asking for the same things. Templates allow you to deal with them with just a few clicks, rather than by copying and pasting or typing variations of the same information each time a new e-mail arrives.

A Mac-based solution, Mail Tem-plate(www.mailtemplate.mac-tank.com), creates automatic replies to incoming e-mails or automatically generates new ongoing e-mails, perhaps to kick off frequent administrative tasks. You can insert tags indicating where a first name or text from the original e-mail should be quoted. The system then automatically finds that data and inserts it, saving you time.

Users of Microsoft Outlook traditionally have relied on its “autotext” feature for this function. Technically capable users can identify a shorthand phrase that, when typed, would be replaced with a longer block of text. In Outlook 2007, that is expanded into a proper template facility, says Caley.

“Using the ‘insert’ tab in Outlook 2007, you have the ability to insert a text box,” she says. “And it now goes beyond just text.” Not only can text blocks be added, but you can also embed your calendar into the e-mail, sending information about the times that you are available, without divulging details of other appointments.

@page_break@> Check E-mail Less Frequently. Identify a set number of times in the day that you will check and process your e-mail in batch form. When you’ve finished, shut it down and avoid looking at it until the next scheduled time.

These methods of dealing with e-mail will help you to save valuable time and put you in control of your e-mail inbox. IE