If you’re like most social media users, you probably have a rather cluttered inbox right now. Personally, I was quickly approaching 10,000 unread messages and 31% of Gmail’s 7448 MB maximum storage. I’d stopped reading my main inbox simply because it was swarmed with — not spam, not junk — but definitely unnecessary messages. These include social network notifications, newsletters I don’t have time to view, and other items I don’t need to read or reply to.

Some people call this type of e-mail Bacn, but whatever you call it, those kinds of message end up burying the ones we actually want and need to read — notes from friends and family, or updates from colleagues. So, using typical e-mail search and labeling features, we’ve figured out how to brutally execute thousands of pointless, unread e-mails within a half hour. If unread e-mail is a problem for you, you might want to consider these steps, too.

Useless Notifications

First, take a look at your big, scary inbox just as it is. Are there sender names that stand out as repeat offenders in the “sending useless notifications” category? Target those e-mails first.

In your e-mail search box, type in “Facebook,” “YouTube,” “Digg,” or the name of any other web service that’s sending you too many notifications. When the e-mail client returns your results, click the appropriate text or button to select all those e-mails. For Gmail users, you’ll then see another option near the top of your results reading: “All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search.” Select all the conversations and delete them. After the cleanse, consider changing your e-mail settings for each network, or change your spam and filtration settings for your e-mail client.

Next, do a series of searches for e-mails that contain words such as “invitation,” “event,” “add/added friend” or “comment,” especially in the subject. You’ll find a lot of notifications here, too.

If you have a lot of legitimate conversations about web services, you might want to go into the advanced search options and enter the automatic sender e-mail address in the “from” field instead of using this scorched-earth approach. If there are one or two messages that get deleted that you’d rather save, just search for them in your Trash folder and move them back to the Inbox.

Event Promotions and Confirmations

If you go to any conferences, events, tweetups, baby showers, etc., you’ve probably got a lingering and useless string of e-mails about those events, as well. Search for the names of past events you’ve attended or been invited to, then either delete or archive those messages, depending on how important it is for you to save those e-mails. Again, if you have more than one screenful of e-mails for the search term, remember to select all the e-mails that apply, not just the ones visible on your screen.

Pitches, PR and Promotions

If you’re an influencer or active beta tester, you probably get a lot of unwanted e-mail from folks who want to capitalize on your mindshare. Press releases, pitches — whatever you want to call them — they can certainly clutter up your inbox in a hurry. Search for and delete e-mails that contain words such as “press,” “pitch,” “inquiry,” “briefing” and “launch.” And if you do test a lot of web apps, you probably have a ton of e-mails containing words such as “confirmation” and “welcome.” You know the formula: Search, select all, delete.

Online Payments and Shopping Receipts

If you do any online shopping, you will get notifications that you won an eBay auction, confirmed a Priceline trip, or used PayPal to complete an Amazon.com purchase. These e-mails might be good to keep around, so search for them by domain — including Trash in case they were deleted in previous sweeps — and archive them. Then again, if you don’t care about record-keeping, you can delete those messages, too. Keywords often found for online expenditure-related e-mails are “account,” “order,” “purchase” and “payment.”

E-mail Newsletters

Are e-mail newsletters an issue? A good keyword to search for is “unsubscribe.” You’ll see newsletters and promo e-mails you didn’t even remember subscribing to in the first place. Again, select all and delete.

Another great string of keywords will eliminate a slew of autobot-style messages. Try searching for “donotreply,” “noreply,” “do-not-reply” and “no-reply.” Once again, mass e-mails, old newsletters and social media notifications will appear for your archiving and/or deleting pleasure. As you’re going along, make a list of the newsletters or promotional e-mails you’re getting that you don’t read. Go through and unsubscribe from each one when your inbox cleanse is finished.

Finishing the Cleanse

You might feel drunk with power, or glowing like a new mother, but we know for sure you’ll feel amazing when you see how drastically these steps have reduced your inbox count. Processing the rest should be a relative piece of cake.

If you feel what we like to call “Deleter’s Remorse,” just scroll lightly through your Trash folder and search for any red flags, such as your spouse’s name or your favorite hobby; those e-mails can be easily selected and recovered to the inbox.

And if you feel really, really guilty, just set up an auto-response or e-mail signature letting folks know you just did the “Mashable E-mail Master Cleanse,” and you apologize if their message was accidentally deleted in the process.

Got any other tips or keywords for us? Let us know in the comments. And happy cleansing!

Google announced the addition of OAuth support in Gmail in a blog post today, which is a highly positive move that allows you to give third party applications access to the contents on your email without having to give them your password. You may be familiar with the term from Twitter, who added OAuth support back in April of last year.

Besides making a more secure Gmail environment, the news could be even more significant if it inspires a flush of innovation from third party developers to build custom applications on top of Gmail. Google itself occasionally adds experimental new functionality via Gmail Labs that users can opt into, but a secure OAuth sign-in platform could be a key feature that really promotes an explosion of Gmail apps from outside developers.

It remains to be seen if that Gmail app gold rush will take off, but at least one company is already taking advantage of the new OAuth feature. Syphir makes an iPhone application called SmartPush, which lets you define under what conditions an incoming email should trigger a push notification on your phone. As illustrated in the screenshot above, thanks to OAuth you don’t have to give Syphir your Gmail password in order to access your email. Online cloud backup service Backupify let us know they’ll be adding OAuth support for their Gmail backup service as well beginning tomorrow.

What do you think: will we see an explosion of third party Gmail Apps emerge? What kind of apps would you want to see built on top of your email?