By Ian Bush

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – They got the gifts, you get the e-mails. Online shopping means a post-holiday deluge in our inboxes.

Year after year, e-commerce keeps growing. The numbers show it — and not just in the virtual cash registers.

“You are going to start receiving e-mails from those retailers throughout the year,” hoping to win another sale, says Tom Sather, a senior director at the e-mail certification and research firm Return Path.

But manually unsubscribing is so 2011 — and all your messages probably could use some pruning.  Hotmail’s Sweep feature helps you tame an unruly inbox. Yahoo!, Gmail, and AOL users can automate the process with an app called OtherInbox, which organizes your mail into folders.

“You’ll only be receiving personal messages within your inbox, and all of your retail messages and marketing messages go to the ‘shopping’ section.”

And, Sather says, there’s a click-and-drag ‘unsubscribe’ category that does the dirty work for you.

Of course, some people love having the inside line on Internet shopping specials.

“I would recommend color-coding and tagging them as the e-mails come in,” Sather suggests, keeping your inbox informed and clutter-free.   Most of the major e-mail providers offer a filing system with “rules” you can set to automatically sort messages as they arrive.