Use Aliases to Quickly Catalog Email [Gmail]

One way to help you organize your email is to automatically catalog messages by creating address aliases and/or employing filters.

Not all email providers allow for alias creation, but Gmail does. If you don't have a Gmail account, you can setup one for free (advertising supported). Then simply create aliases to use for specific categories. For instance, if you order a lot of items via on-demand delivery, perhaps create an alias using "instant" or "pronto" then setup a filter to label all messages sent to this alias as "On Demand Deliveries" or something similar.

You can create an Gmail Alias on the fly: Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, any messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.

Using an alias makes it simple to find receipts or to determine the last time you ordered from a specific restaurant and to keep a "running tab" on what is consuming the most "email bandwidth" ---you might not realize that you get 100 messages a week from a specific vendor until you check your "On Demand" alias box (label).

For this to work, you have to recall which alias is used for what category.