In Through the Out Box

Oh, good, just what we need, another daily task masquerading as a psychological test (or vice versa):

Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages.

The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you.

"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"

On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.

I never read e-mail; I print out all messages and immediately eat them. It's safer that way. I reply randomly to to messages and calculate the odds that my response will be relevant to the original message. But then I only reply to messages that have the letter "q" in them. If the word "mackerel" appears in any message, I start clucking like a chicken. I sort all my mail by the fifth letter of the sender's middle name. If I don't know the sender's middle name, I have to stop work for the day and go out and walk aimlessly around the park for several hours, muttering the word "megaphone" to myself over and over. Any message marked "urgent" is printed on a large-format poster printer 36 x 72 inches and applied to the roof of my car so that it's readable from a circling helicopter, which is where I go to read it. I have separate e-mail accounts for every message I receive, and before I send a message I set up a separate e-mail account for it. I only save the messages that I receive from people's pets.

Let's not even talk about snail mail.