FULTON, MO -- The average professional gets more than 100 e-mails every day. That's enough to load up your inbox quicker than you can clean it out.

In a recent survey, one third of Americans say they'd rather clean their toilet than their inbox. But it can be done, and without too much hassle.

As the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Westminster College, Scott Lowe gets hundreds of e-mails every day.

Lowe said, "It just gives you that feeling of being overwhelmed."

And all that email can bog you down.

Lowe said, "Regardless of whether it's personal or professional, the more unread email in your inbox, the more you feel like you've not done something that you're supposed to be doing.

Marsha Egan, national expert who travels the country promoting her program and book called ‘Inbox Detox’, agrees; extra email causes extra stress.

Marsha Egan said, "Leaving items in your inbox is like having a desk that has papers all over it without being in order. It's an instance source of stress."

Scott Lowe says first things first- take preventive measures.

"First, make sure you have a strong spam filter in place wherever you are."

Also, sign up for a free email account through a service like Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail that's separate from your primary account. Then, use that email account for coupons and services, so you aren't getting flooded with those e-mails when you're trying to be productive.

Use the tools your email server already has, especially outlook express.

Lowe said, "I've set up rules in Outlook. Outlook determines the source of the message and based on the source, categorizes into a folder for me. It's shown in your inbox for a split second, but the rules grab it and put it in the appropriate folder."

In Gmail, you can give e-mails a label like personal, receipts, travel, work to categorize them

Egan says think of your inbox, like your regular mailbox.

"You sort it. You throw some stuff away, but you don't put it back in the USPS mailbox."

Another trick to use is the search function. You can search by key word or an email sender, then put all the results into a specific folder or just delete them all.

Both experts say disable the "notification" e-mail alerts from sites like Twitter and Facebook to cut down on clutter.

The Radicati Group estimates about 294 billion emails are sent every day. How many of those are showing up in your email? And, does your inbox need a detox? How many emails do you have in there? Do you think you’re below the average or above? Let us know, leave a comment below.