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Checking email, reading email and answering email can take up hours of time if you let it. But only if you let it. Here are four simple email management rules to help you keep control of your inbox:

1) Let your email program manage your email as much as possible.
Email management starts with setting up and using filters. If you're using an email program such as Outlook, you can configure email rules to send your spam directly to the trash - meaning that you don't waste your time reading and deleting it.

But it’s not a losing battle. New technology can filter out more than 97 percent of spam — without axing legitimate messages.

SoftScan, a European managed-security services provider focused on messaging, reported that spam levels dipped slightly in January to 96.8 percent of all email scanned, compared with 97.02 percent in December 2007.

While SoftScan’s reported drop isn’t much of a break in unsolicited email (the company describes it as a “lull before the next surge”), other observers failed to detect even a limited respite.

“While logic would dictate that spam levels would subside after the holidays, they’ve continued to soar and reached 78.5 percent of all email traffic during January,” Symantec Corp. noted in its recent spam report.

A consensus on the definition for "unified communications" may be harder to establish than you might think. For example, here are some possible definitions:

     - A unified communications system routes voicemail sent to one or more telephone numbers and faxes to one or more fax numbers into an e-mail inbox where they can be heard and viewed in a manner similar to e-mail.
     - A unified communications system routes conventional voicemail, conventional faxes, SMS messages, instant messages, e-mail, VoIP traffic and other content to an e-mail inbox where this content can be viewed using a single interface.