The Digital Inspiration blog points out that combining Gmail's filters, easy email (or mailto:) links, and the mass familiarity with email makes it easy to conduct your own polls amongst contact groups. Simply set up question responses with answers that match temporary + addresses, and you'll get quick counts and individual data on your questions. Hit the link below for a complete walk-through.

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One of the lesser-known useful things about Gmail's filters is that they work on email you send as well as email you receive. So you can do things like label all messages you send with the word "Request" in the subject as "Waiting for," or label any email that has the word "Invoice" in it that you send to your client or boss with the "Invoice" label, or label any email that goes to certain addresses "Family" or "Softball team." There are some limitations with outgoing Gmail filters, however—you can't search on special characters (like [w]) and you can't do certain actions, like forward the messages to another email address. Do you filter outgoing Gmail? What are your most useful filters? Share in the comments.

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The Simple Dollar personal finance blog posts a great idea for anyone looking for a deal on a particular item or group of goods who doesn't want to be tempted by other deep discounts at a place like Amazon's Gold Box section. Using an RSS-filtering tool like Feed Sifter (or any keyword-search tool, like Feed Rinse), you can get pinged only when the specific item you really can buy shows up at an affordable price. For local deals, try setting up Craigslist feeds using boolean operators.

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If you've got an overstuffed inbox and you want to declare Inbox Zero without individually marking messages as read, you can mark all unread mail as read using a Gmail filter. Create a new filter with is:unread in the Has the words field, then tell Gmail to Mark as read all matching messages. Finally, tick the box next to Also apply filter to conversations below and create the filter. The filter will mark all your unread items as read. If you just want to clear out unread items in a specific label, add something like label:Followup to the Has the words box with is:unread. Simple, quick, and you don't have to page through thousands of emails to get the job done. Just be sure to delete the filter when you're done. UPDATE: As bostonguy points out, Gmail has added an option in search results to select all conversations that match a search, which makes the filter unnecessary. See the screenshot after the jump.

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Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob filters comments on YouTube videos that don't meet your snobbish standards. It does so using a combination of criteria, like a user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox's spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalisation. You can enable or disable any of the filter options if you don't mind capital letters, for example, and you can view any hidden comment by simply clicking Show. It's a pretty saucy little extension, but now it's hard not to want a full-on Internet Comment Snob.

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Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string—&as_qdr=d—to the address bar and hit enter. You'll get a custom drop-down box that lets you re-order results based on date. It's great for getting past the same top results you've already looked through, as well as grabbing only the newest links related to gadgets, software, or whatever else you're searching. Sadly it doesn't work on Google Images, but let us know in the comments if it does work on other Google searches.

The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that's probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words "Inbox" and "unread messages." The tools available to read and send emails have advanced considerably since then, but what you actually do with all that chatter, without eating up entire days of work time, is up to you. Luckily, we've covered a wealth of filtering and processing methods and software tweaks that make email less stressful and time-consuming over the years, and a list of our top 10 productive email boosters is after the jump.

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Gmail's collaborative video—which asked Gmail users to contribute videos of Gmail messages traveling the world—is out in the wild.