Perform these three steps to empty any e-mail inbox.

Step 1: Delete all the spam. Users should set up mail filters to automatically delete some of the more frequent spam messages, but they’ll always have to delete some spam by hand. The section on AntiSpam filters, beginning with Personal AntiSpam Filters, explains this item in more detail.

Step 2: Read any personal mail from friends or family, then do whatever you want with it. Print it, file it, archive it, – after which you must delete those messages from the inbox.

With the first two steps completed, the remaining messages in the inbox are somewhere between too irrelevant to read (spam) and too relevant to delay reading (business mail). In preparation for Step 3, make sure that the inbox messages are sorted by date, with the oldest message on the top of the list.

Step 3: Open each message, from top to bottom of the inbox, engage it — that is, take some action — then delete it from the inbox. When this step is done, the inbox will be empty. The next section, How to Engage an Email, explains this step in detail.