I’m a user of Apple’s Mail application, but not a super-heavy user. Generally, it will be a handful of emails from coworkers in addition to a large number of messages from mailing lists to which I’m subscribed (some internal company lists, some external). I also get a few emails on my personal accounts.
Mail fully supports multiple accounts, so I have them all loaded up and ready to go. For my company account (POP), I check mail every minute. Personal accounts are all IMAP based; some check more often than others.
I am a heavy user of rules on incoming mail – every message to my work account is run through a number of rules to filter, mark and notify me of various things. All mailing list mail gets filtered to a set of mailboxes, one for each list. Any message that is from *me* to one of those lists is marked as read, as that is less confusing when I post a whole bunch of messages to the lists, only to have them come back immediately as new mail.
Apple Mail also supports attaching AppleScripts to rules. On messages that get filtered to mailboxes, their unread status is not displayed in the dock icon, so I don’t know if there is unread mail that was filtered until I switch back to Mail. I have attached a script to the rules that posts a notification of the incoming mail via Growl, popping up a little transparent status message at the bottom of my screen. If it is something I want to look at I can pop right over to Mail and read it.
With these tools I’m able to get a good handle on email without it being too much of a drag. There are some other things I”m looking at that I’ll report on at a future time.