Email: We love it, we hate it, we love to hate it. But since it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, we’re here to help you make the best of it.

From tips for powering through your overflowing inbox to strategies to help you get less of it in the first place to smart ways to make sure the emails you do send make a big impact, we’ve got everything you need to turn your inbox into a communication powerhouse.

Prevent follow-up emails by ending your messages with clear instructions instead of questions. Instead of saying, “Should we reconnect next week?” try, “I’ll give you a call Tuesday morning to reconnect.” If that doesn’t work, your recipient will let you know—but otherwise, you’ve prevented an unnecessary back-and-forth.

Resist the urge to respond to every email right way. As Alexandra Franzen explains , “a lot of ‘urgent’ emails tend to resolve themselves without your assistance. By choosing not to respond instantaneously, you’re training people to be more self-reliant—while creating sane, realistic expectations about how quickly you’ll be able to reply.”

Try using an email auto-responder—and not only when you’re out of the office. Your auto-response doesn’t have to be long or detailed, but a quick “Hi, I’ve received your email and will get back to you when I can!” message may keep the eager beavers from sending follow-up emails before you’ve had a chance to respond. Here’s how to set it up .

If you’re getting lots of unwanted mail from individuals, you can also try BoxBe . BoxBe uses what it calls a personalized “Guest List” to ensure that you get email from people who matter to you, while screening messages from anyone else into a separate “Waiting List.” Anyone who isn’t on your Guest List will receive a request to verify their message before it is delivered to your inbox.

The easiest way to stop getting so many emails in the first place is to unsubscribe to those dozens of newsletters you sort-of-kind-of-intended to read—but really never do. Unroll.me is the absolute easiest way to identify those suckers in your inbox—and mass unsubscribe.

Want to keep your emails both short and productive? Commit to making every message five sentences long—or less. There’s even a site that’s built to help: five.sentenc.es! As it explains, “Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.” Need some advice on keeping things brief, but still polite? Elliott Bell has some great tips.

If you find yourself emailing the same messages over and over again, save templates in your drafts folder (here are 27 to start with) or take advantage of Gmail’s “Canned Responses” lab, which lets you save any number of responses and easily insert them into your emails. (See how to set it up, courtesy of Gadgetwise.)

Send a lot of emails from your phone? Try auto text, a tool that lets you type a customized abbreviation that then expands into a complete text blurb. For example, typing “rl8” can expand to “I’m running late,” which is handy when you’re running to a meeting. (Here’s how to set it up.)

Unless your job requires you to be immediately responsive to emails, set just a few times each day that you’ll check your inbox. This time can be different every day, it just has to be intentional (for example, today I’ll set aside from 9-10 AM to go through my inbox, then I’ll look at it again from 4-5).

Add two tags (or filters in Gmail) to your inbox: “quick reply” and “requires focused time.” When you know you have a solid block of uninterrupted time, start by opening your focused time folder, and decide which ones you most need to tackle. And next time you have a couple minutes to spare while waiting for the bus or in line for coffee, open your “quick reply” folder instead of checking Instagram.

Set up your email so that once you’ve dealt with one email and filed it away or deleted it, you’re taken straight to the next one in your inbox instead of back to the list of emails. (For Gmail, you can do this via the Auto-Advance option in Gmail Labs.) This reduces any time you’d spend deciding which message to pay attention to next!