Easy: leave all emails that might be important as unread. That way, you know they’re important because they’re unread. Continue to never read them until you’ve got over 400 unread emails in your inbox. Then just mass delete any more than a month old, because they can’t still be important or relevant. Continue to feel guilty and not read emails.

Absolutely flawless system for me so far.

I get a lot of email at my job (~200 per day) and to stay on top of the binge I need to separate emails that truly need action from those that I just need to read or can ignore entirely. The filing filing approach doesn’t work for me (even with automated rules) because it’s too easy to miss something when there are many places to check.

Here is what works for me. I use Outlook but other clients may have similar features:

• My inbox is my “to do list” as another commenter said, and all emails come into it. I’ve also disabled the Focused Inbox.
• I use conditional formatting rules to change the appearance of subject lines in the inbox depending on how they are addressed:
  1. If I am in the To line with other people then the format is standard Outlook formatting with blue text. Unread emails are bolded.
  2. If I am only in the CC line, the email is colored gray. Unread is still in bolded.
  3. If I am in the To line alone, then I keep the font color blue but increase the font size so it is BIG and obvious that an email is addressed to me specifically.
• Whenever I am “done” with an email (replied / read / taken action) then I move it out of my inbox into a single folder called Archive. I have a Quick Action set up to mark an email as read and move it to that folder.
• The “group by conversation” feature is a great help: it organized email chains by subject line, making it easy to find related emails. When a new email comes in the entire group pops to the top of my inbox (even emails that were archived), which helps if I’ve missed or forgotten something.
• To find things later, I make extensive use of the search functionality. Many email clients support complex searches to find exactly what you want. For example: “myproject from:Stacy to:Adam hasattachment:true”

I start most days by going through the gray/low priority emails and quickly clicking Archive on the ones that done need attention, then replying to those addressed to me. Throughout the day I only have ~10 emails that stay in the inbox as true “to do”, and below those are any I didn’t finish from the day before.

Good luck on your own email organization journey!

I use outlook at work but again it’s more about the process.

My inbox is my “to do” list. I have lots of folders and subfolders and I file everything. Once a day I try to take a few minutes to file stuff that’s been dealt with.

I do also file some "sent"mail too as I’m kinda CYA cautious like that.

I get a bit stressed if my inbox gets to the point where I have to scroll down through it - that tells me I need to delegate, file or close out some items.

Some people never file anything and just use the search function in whatever email client they’re in, but I’m a bit old and never had that function in the early days so it doesn’t come naturally to me - an inbox with 20,000 messages in it just freaks me out.

I also use the conversation function which keeps everything tied together regardless of which folder it’s in.

Trial and error. You don’t have to stick to a routine or method - if it’s not working for you, change something until it does.

For me I set up my corporate inbox with tons of rules to automate sorting inbound emails to relevant folders. I worked in software support so I had folders for each company my team communicated with on a regular basis, folders for internal emails like announcements and business/facilities updates, and the general inbox just caught anything I hadn’t created a rule for yet. Outlook folders all display unread counts to it was easy for me.

I didn’t delete anything. I let my companies retention policy handle that.