For many people, the e-mail inbox is one big hodgepodge of messages.

PTA announcements stand alongside offers for Viagra. That confirmation for your business seminar is in the middle of four offers for mature women in your area who want to misbehave. You need to return a phone call and the number is somewhere in your e-mail - but where?

Taking control of your electronic mail is just as important as dealing with the reams of paper that seem to overtake you at work and at home.

The key is to have a plan and stick with it.

All your e-mail messages land in one spot - the inbox. This is like keeping all your files in one huge folder. It works for a while, but it's not very practical.

Your job is to keep that inbox down to a manageable size. But where do you start?

Spam control

Depending on who's counting, between 50 percent and 90 percent of all e-mail is spam - those unsolicited messages cluttering everyone's e-mail.

If your Internet service provider is worth its salt, it already filters your e-mail for spam. AOL, MSN, SBC/Yahoo! and Comcast all offer spam filtering in their basic service. Go to your ISP's home page and search for spam or bulk mail filtering. You'll find options there to set the level of filtering that's right for you.

Filtered messages usually land in a separate folder for you to peruse.

Scan the folder once a day or so until you feel comfortable nothing important is ending up there.

If you aren't happy with your ISP's filter or if your provider has no filter, you can use a desktop-level spam-filtering program.

These do the same job as the server-based siblings, but you have all the control.

After you get rid of spam, you still have a lot to do.

David Allen, management consultant and author of books such as Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, (Penguin, $15) says the key is to make rapid decisions about what each message means to you the first time you see it.

"E-mail is the beast that's out of the barn right now - and you're not going to be getting any less of it in the future," Mr. Allen says.

He says getting to know the keyboard, categorizing messages and filing them in folders is critical.

"I don't think I've met two people who implement this exactly alike," he says. "Everyone has their own style."

Your goal should be zero messages in your inbox at the end of the day, or at least once a week.

Important messages can get lost in your inbox, especially if the message falls below the first screen-full of messages. Constantly rereading subject lines looking for a message you received last Wednesday is not the best use of your time.

Start by learning how to make folders in your e-mail program. Right-click on the folder list and look for New Folder in the pop-up menu there or under your File menu. When in doubt, use the help section of your e-mail client to learn how to make folders.

Now create folders that suit your work, and as you receive messages, use your mouse to drag the ones you want to keep into those files. Mr. Allen likes the categories Reference, Future Action, Action and Waiting For.

"Reference" messages should be easy to identify - they might contain schedules or meeting notices - anything you'll need to know later but not at any specific time.

"Action" items are things you want to do in the next day or so. "Future Action" items might be meeting notices or appointment confirmations that you'll need to be aware of sometime in the future. If you use Outlook for your e-mail, Mr. Allen recommends setting the "Future Action" items as tasks on your calendar so they'll automatically set a reminder that will pop up on your computer screen. You can also right-click on a message and select "flag for follow-up" to set a reminder.

Automation

We all get regular e-mail such as your favorite airline's weekend fare sales or a department store alerting you to its deal of the day.

These can be automatically sorted into their own folders without your even touching them.

Most e-mail programs have automation built in, ready for you to set up for your needs. Look for a command called Rules or Organize.

To set up a rule, you'll need to know the address the message comes from and what you want the program to do with the message (in this case move it to a folder you've created). You can even set up a rule that deletes the message after a certain time (say two weeks).

This way you can ignore those travel specials until you are really ready to go somewhere. The latest messages will be right there waiting for you.

The two-minute rule

As you clear the inbox, watch for the action items and separate the ones you can complete in two minutes or less.

"If you can take that action in two minutes or less, go ahead and do it right then, the first time you open that e-mail," Mr. Allen says. "The two-minute rule is magic - it'll add six months on your life."

He reasons that two minutes is longer than it will take you to read the message, file it, then retrieve that message, read it again and take action.

Do the action quickly, then discard the message.

Actions that take longer can quickly steer your brain away from the task at hand - clearing your inbox. Put the longer tasks into an Action folder. Mr. Allen likes to make sure that folder looks different than the others by capitalizing the word putting an @ before the name (@ACTION).

The "at" symbol will make the folder jump to the top of the folder list and the capital letters will command attention.

Another folder to create is @WAITING FOR, which will catch all the messages you can't act upon until something else happens first. For example, a phone call you can't return until your boss approves a report.

Diligence

Once you get your inbox clean, be diligent in reading and acting on the e-mail in the other folders. Don't let your @ACTION folder get too large. If items in that folder take more than a few weeks to finish, look into putting them in another folder.

Also, feel free to make other categories, such as one for jokes or one called Perhaps Someday for crazy ideas.

Set aside time on your weekly schedule to go through each folder and cull out the stragglers and delete messages once the action has been completed.