Gmail tips - How to win the battle against your 1000 mails in your inbox?

I personnaly don't like having my inbox full; I feel tension coming, too much things to do, I may miss important mail (from you for example :-)). So I have been trying many "technics" and now I am always the winner.

So this is the recipe:

Tip1 : Don't let the enemy impress you, use Filters
While creat ing filters you can choose some actions (Archive, Assign a label, Delete, etc.). So for example for some of your newletters, you can decide to archive them and add the label "LI_Newsletter" (less inportant newsletter).

Tip2: Point all you enemies use Labels (each one of them has specific attack strategy)
Adding Labels (tags) to mails helps first to categorize them. A mail can have as many as label/tag as you want so you can abuse. It also makes life easy when you need to do some actions on a type of mails (see mails from your boss for example :)).

Tip3: Don't let the enemy use the "surprise attack technic" Mark as read
If you know what the type of a mail you don't obvioulsy need to read it (at least now). Thus by marking a mail "read" it saves you a lot of time.

Tip4: Remove dead enemies from the battle field Archive
DO remember that the main goal is to have our inbox as empty as possible. So if we don't need to keep useless mails in the inbox. By useless mail I meant mails we won't read soon, we will no more check, mails that can be delete, etc.

Once you won many battles we can go to the next stage that is "Party time" because we have now an empty inbox ;).