Maintaining control of my inbox is an ongoing challenge for just about everyone, especially in business environments. One of my biggest email challenges if figuring out how to deal with non-urgent emails. The first challenge is determining what emails are truly urgent, which ones have valuable - although not urgent - information, and which can be immediately trashed.

Earlier this summer, I went on a vacation where I literally did not check my email for four days. That's about 3 days and 16 hours longer than I normally go without checking with sleep taken into consideration. With a full four days of email to digest upon returning from vacation, it became extraordinarily clear that I was receiving a ton of email that was basically worthless to me.

Here are my top three biggest inbox annoyances:

1. Travel Newsletters: Do I really need an email update on my frequent flier miles, airfare deals for this week that I can't use, or yet another offer for thousands of miles if I sign up for a mileage credit card? Nope. I'd like to receive mileage updates via RSS and probably flight updates via RSS as well if I could set the search criteria myself. Then the content would be relevant to me in a format I prefer.

2. Trade Newsletters: I'm referring to newsletters that provide valuable information, but not necessarily breaking news or immediately actionable information. They're valuable, but much of this information can be found on blogs, which means I can subscribe to the same information using my RSS reader.

3. Retail Newsletters: It's amazing how poorly targeted the average retail newsletter is. If they don't provide product recommendations that in some way reflect that they actually know me or don't provide some kind of additional value such as home improvement tips, most popular product (with some reasons why they're popular), why should I continue opening them? Well, I don't, and I unsubscribe. It's amazing how few online retailers offer RSS feeds for search results. Craigslist is way ahead of the crowd here.

Are there categories of emails cluttering up your inbox too? If so, what? Would you prefer receiving the same information in a different format like RSS? What makes the emails clutter rather than valuable to you?