My email archive doesn’t contain spam. It does contain 33,871 emails. And I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m certainly not a prolific emailer. I do send more than President Clinstone, but not a huge many – I’d say I’m probably a fairly average user of email. Yet, in the last month, I’ve received in excess of 1,000 non-spam emails.

Not all of them are personal, of course. The majority are newsletter subscriptions, or the hundreds I am sent every month by people from uni, usually advertising houses in a different part of the country to me. Not helpful, but not really spam.

In the same period last year, I received 292 emails. So my volume of non-spam email has more than tripled in the last year. If this trend continues, my email inbox is going to become completely unmanagable.

So instead of presenting my emails most-recent first, why not invent a ‘rate this email’ feature, much like the ‘rate this song’ feature on music websites, so that my webmail system can learn what’s important to me, and present that first, and adverts for pub crawls last?

Now there’s a thought.