Email newsletter subscriptions can pile up, and the start of a New Year is as good a time as any to finally unsubscribe from email you don’t want to receive. Here’s a Gmail tip for finding most subscriptions in your mailbox, so you can either go through one by one, or set filters to organize them by labels. Simply search for the word “unsubscribe.” This isn’t foolproof, but it will catch most of subscriptions in your inbox.

Spending less time dealing with email is a worthy goal. At Taming Email Leo Notenboom espouses an unusual tactic. In order to reduce the amount of email you receive, send less email. In other words, stop before you hit send, and ask yourself a few questions such as is email the right tool for the task at hand, and are you sending to the right people. Learn more at his One Simple Trick to Getting Less Email article.

Attention Hotmail and MSN users: itt’s time to change your password. According to Neowin, an anonymous hacker posted thousands of Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords. The first list of over 10,000 accounts only includes account names that start with the letters A and B, but there was a hint that there could be more lists.

On October 1, 100,000 lucky users got an invitation to preview Google’s new real-time communication platform: Google Wave. It combines email, instant messaging, chat, project management and social networking in a client that sits within the browser. To learn more, read Mashable’s guide or watch Google’s video .

Email experts advise against using your email inbox as storage and instead suggest frequently cleaning it out and storing old messages in archive folders instead. For Gmail users, here’s a filter that will move all messages older than a certain date to your archive. Click “Create a Filter” and in “Has the words” enter “before:2009/07/01″. Now choose “Next.” Check “Skip the Inbox” and the box that says “Also apply this to the conversations below.” Now click “Create Filter.” Of course, you can change the filter to use any date of your choice, in the format “before:YYYY/MM/DD”.

Kevin Purdy offers this email writing tip on LifeHacker.com. To make your emails more direct, and less prone to what he calls the “Oops-Forgot-To-Add” syndrome, reverse the order in which you compose them. Start with the attachment, then write the body, add a subject, and then add the recipients.

A recent round of PayPal phishing schemes brings up the importance of staying diligent and alert when responding to email. To sharpen your phishing sensors, PayPal offers a Fight Phishing Challenge . Common Crafts explains Phishing Scams in Plain English. And Wombat Security Technologies offers an educational Anti-Phishing Phil game based work done at Carnegie-Mellon.

Do you know when and how to use the Blind Carbon Copy feature of your email client? When addressing an email to send to a single recipient, it’s obvious that their address goes in the TO field and yours in the FROM field. But when sending a message to a large list (whether it’s an invitation to a hula party or a business memo), email etiquette suggests that you hide that long list of email addresses. This is when you use BCC for your list of recipients, and put your own email address in both the TO and FROM fields. To learn more about CC and BCC read Russ Harvey’s Proper Email Etiquette.

Efficient use of Gmail (Google’s free email service at http://www.gmail.com ) requires a paradigm shift in how you think about your email inbox. Other email services and clients treat email as you might a piece of paper in your office. It is either in your inbox, a filing cabinet or a trash can. Gmail does not, however, emulate a a filing cabinet with folders, where your mail can only be in one folder at a time. Instead, it offers a label and search system, where mail moves from your inbox to a single archive, and is retrieved via search or by one of the multiple labels that can be assigned to it. Stephen Shankland explains why he became a Gmail convert (
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9994405-2.html ).

If you are tired of changing your email address whenever your ISP changes, buying your own domain name is a simple way to assure that you can keep the same email address year after year. A domain costs about $8 to $18 per year, depending on where you buy it. Once you own your domain (such as “your-name-here.com”), you can then pick an email address such as “me@your-name-here.com” and have your domain registrar forward all incoming email to either your ISP email address, or a free webmail provider such as Gmail or Yahoo.