Is your inbox cluttered with meaningless notification emails from sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest? Todays tip is a nudge to spend five minutes now, and save yourself time everyday by having fewer incoming emails to delete. Notification Control doesnt actually do anything except point you to the exact URL for notification settings for twelve popular services, including Four Square and Google+ (in addition to those already mentioned above.) Go ahead. Give your inbox a break!

According to tech guru Leo Notenboom, the number one problem reported in 2011 by the millions of visitors that seek help from his Ask Leo website was email account theft. If you believe your email account has been comprised, immediately login in and change both your password and all your security questions. To learn more about protecting your email account, read Is Changing My Password Enough?

Do you worry about strangers reading your email? Perhaps a nefarious hacker or the government? Sorry to burst your conspiracy bubble, but chances are that the email voyeur reading your email is someone you know, such as a spouse, boss or work colleague. An email privacy survey by Retrvo Blog confirms that there is a “lot of snooping and tracking going on among people who know each other.” Internet guru Bob Rankin offers his viewpoint here.

Gmail account almost full? Anne Mitchell of The Internet Patrol explains how to free lots of space by deleting old attachments. On the other hand, you can always simply buy more storage space from Google. 20GB costs just $5.00 a year.

To help you keep your Gmail account secure, Gmail lists recent sessions at the bottom of your inbox. There you can view recent account activity, and also see if your Gmail account is still logged in another session. If you do see another open session (maybe its simply your laptop?) there is a link to log out of the remote session.

Although free web-based email services such as Gmail (and Hotmail and Yahoo! mail) offer great features and convenience at a great price, they are subject to outages and data loss. The simplest way to protect yourself is to make a local copy of your cloud-based email box with an email client installed on your personal computer. With the tweak of just a few Gmail settings, you can download all your email messages to your own computer for safekeeping (assuming, of course, that you already have a backup plan in place for your computer!) Wired How-To Wiki explains exactly how to do this with the free email program Mozilla Thunderbird.

Need a bit of inspiration (and fun) to help you reach the ultimate techie goal of an empty email inbox? 0Boxer is a browser-based game for Gmail users that turns clearing your inbox into a social competition, complete with badges for reaching certain milestones. Earn points for archiving, deleting and replying, and see how you stack up against your friends! The free 0Boxer game plugin is currently available for both Chrome and Safari browsers.

If you’ve ever considered buying a domain name for the primary purpose of creating a custom email address such as your-name@your-domain.com, this tutorial from Ask Leo! is just what you need. In it, Leo Notenboom explains domain registration, email forwarding, and using a free email service (such as Gmail) with your custom domain.

Last week Google released a number of new Gmail features to the public, taking them out of Gmail Labs, which is a beta or testing platform. These include message color coding, search autocomplete, forgotten attachment detector, YouTube previews, and vacation away messages. At the same time, some test lab features were killed. To learn more, read CNN “Gmail Holds Graduations and Funerals“.

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.