inbox

It's been over three years since the last time I completely drained my main inbox, and reached #inboxzero.

I've been hitting my inbox hard for the past year now, constantly fighting to get it down to < 50 emails... but every time I hit a holiday weekend, worked on a larger home project, or did something like publish a new project, the inbox would start flooding a bit more. I finally made it my goal this year to purge the emails and hit zero messages by the end of the July 4th weekend—and it worked!

Here are a few things I've been doing this year to try to keep the volume down even further (ironically, the closer I've gotten to zero, the more daily emails I get—now up to about 120/day non-spam):

I was having this particular problem off and on when using Mac OS X Mail on my work Mac, which was set up to use our corporate exchange server, and an 'Exchange 2007' Mail account: Every so often, Mail would quit getting new messages in the inbox, and when I checked the 'Activity' window, I would get the following error:

(Screenshot to be posted here)
("Opening Mailbox — Requesting Latest Information")

Sometimes, simply hitting the 'stop sign' would allow me to get new messages, but the problem would always crop up again. Other times, I'd pull out my Mac laptop, which was set up to use IMAP instead of Exchange (long story, details don't matter), and after syncing it up with the server, and restarting Mail on my main Mac, the problem would go away.

Only today, after finding this forum thread on Apple's Discussion Forums, did I find the source of the problem: