Watching Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" presentation at Google. I got inspired to stop saving emails for CYA purposes. I just deleted over 1600 messages that were accumulating in my inbox. I saved less than 100, into a "Deadmail" archive folder.
This is the cleanest my inbox has looked since I got the account in 1987. Yes. The account is now 20 years old. Actually, this is probably even cleaner than that, since it came with a "Welcome" message, IIRC.
I'm going to try REALLY hard to stick to the "actions" philosophy - delete, delegate, archive, respond, do something.