How do you organize your email? How can I better organize my emails and be a better email-user? I use Gmail (with both a Gmail account and a .edu account both forwarded to it, and Gmail set up to send email as the @gmail and the @.edu account), Apple Mail, and occasionally read emails on my cell phone via Google mobile. My Gmail is setup via IMAP to sync with my Mac, so whatever I do to an email on Gmail or on my phone will show up as a change when I get home and look at Mail on my mac.

Right now, I'm just reading emails and marking as read, and not archiving, tagging, or foldering anything. In a way, this suits me fine -- Gmail and Spotlight searches are effective enough that I can find most old, lost emails pretty readily. More importantly, though, I find myself often missing (more accurately, forgetting about) emails and not getting back to people on stuff. In other words, once something is read, it's read -- I don't have a better system for tracking followup. I get the feeling that I'm not really using email the *right* way -- my inbox is not 0, it's 2338 messages, most of which have been dealt with.

What does everyone else do in this situation? With Spotlight and tags and searching, it seems silly to file emails as they come in, but maybe that's what I should be doing? Or are there simple ways to setup automatic filing and tagging? How does IMAPed Gmail work with Mail with regard to tags?

I realize my question is rather broad and open ended, but I'm pretty clueless about this. Any explanations, tips, tricks, links, etc. help.