I've got nasty habits

I hate to admit it, but I have bad email habits...

I get several hundred emails a day, and I just can't cope (who can?).
If I actually have one of those rare days when I'm sitting in front of my computer in my office most of the day I can just about keep up with what's coming in. But a day of meetings, or days spent travelling and at conferences, and it's all over.

And I'm one of those people who let email pile up in my inbox if I haven't finished dealing with the issue. So the size of the inbox just grows and grows and...

So my admittedly poor technique for dealing with it:

When I'm about to go out of town I save all the messages in my inbox, read or unread, to a folder named "pending". Before I do that, I delete any messages that were already in there from the last time I did it. Then I have a perfectly clean inbox for a few minutes, and when I get home I read the messages that are in the inbox first, referring to messages in the pending folder as needed.

If anybody has a better technique, I'd love to hear it.