One option I use with one of my email accounts is unroll.me It's a service that reads your Gmail and rolls up all these type of emails into a single digest email. They even handle unsubscribe for the ones you don't want to keep.
I worked from home for over a year before, moving to an office. I even wrote a similar blog post to this one last February - http://technikhil.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/distributed-devel...
I moved to an office finally because our company wanted to add a lot more people to our engineering team and as we rapidly started growing, the need to have a proper office and meeting face to face justified getting an office.
At work I use various flavors of Visual Studio (including VS.NET 2003 on Windows 7 http://technikhil.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/visual-studio-200...). For any quick editing and especially text manipulation it's notepad++ or emacs. I am trying to learn emacs but I am still not completely there yet - I use it for text editing mostly with some python editing.