I no longer make any commitment to check emails more than once per half working day. My working day is now based around Slack messages (which is where I now set most of my reminders) and tickets assigned to me. Then the company migrated to gmail, started sending more trivial company-wide messages and signing up whole teams for mostly-irrelevant notification emails, ruined my old workflow and I gave up on it. Result = a clean Inbox, containing only recent unread or todo emails. if the email was for a larger task, then create a task from the email and then file the original email if the email was for an action item that I could complete within a few minutes, then I would flag that email (in case I got interrupted within those few minutes), do that action immediately, then unflag and file the email auto-moved to a folder (or deleted) by rules, for things that didn't need my attention

I was an MS Outlook man for many years, so everything that hit my Inbox was either Everyone has their own way of dealing with email/notification overload, important to not let it get to you, make use of the tools you have to make it manageable, if it's becoming a problem need to rethink your strategy. My big annoyance is being cc'd emails that I don't need to participate in or deal with in any way. Especially the CVE notifications from software vendors so things get patches quickly. Important alerts are also tagged/colored so easy to spot quickly.

Then I can quickly process the alert/notification messages, quickly sort/search, save anything that may be needed before removing clutter/noise messages. So alerts/messages are divided by providers, root of inboxs are kept as close to zero unread as possible. Use filter rules to sort messages to sub folders. Right now between the over a dozen accounts, about 32k unread (about 140k total at the moment, going back 20 years, only import things get kept more than a year), but I rarely miss any important messages, ticket system is always open along with monitoring systems (3 monitors so everything important is always visible at a glance while doing other activities).

2 unread messages in hotmail inbox