Help
There are dozens of strategies for getting your email under control. This is how I do it, and if it doesn't work for you, at least you can get inspired to fix your own messy situation.
"But if I move it out of the inbox I'll never see it!" is something I've heard before. At work I regularly have to peek in users' inboxes and they're full of all sorts of messages that are, let's be honest, not that pressing; social media notifications, automated cron notices, discussion list items. You should really filter all of that out. For one, you probably are already running a separate dashboard for all your Twitter and Facebook feeds and accounts. And secondly, do you really need to know right this second that "Whats-his-name has commented on your comment on So-And-So's Feed?"
I filter everything automated or mass-mailed which I've elected to receive to three folders.
Folder #1) I use this for all of the email related to the tech support queue at work. I delete the contents of this folder regularly as they are just email notifications of comments which have been added to the web-based project queue I look at all the time.
Folder #2) I use this folder for all of my mailing list subscriptions. Everything I've opted in to, from discussion lists, to newsletters. None of this is usually urgent, and so by filtering it to a subfolder, I can set it aside until the time I set aside during my work day to handle all the non-essential work communication that isn't time sensitive. I can delete most of these regularly as most mailing list software (Mailman, for instance) saves an archive of each message sent to the list, on the list's info page. So if I want to find something I can always go back into that website to look for it.
Folder #3) I use this folder for all of the automated notifications I get which aren't usually from a person. Most of this is email from Cron daemons, or to the postmaster alias I'm on for work. I would also put all of those Twitter, Facebook, etc notifications here if I didn't already disable them all from within those social sites' notification preferences. I usually delete everything here when it gets up to over 5000 messages. I rarely have to look at each of these, and once I have over 1000 unread messages... I can't spend 30 to 60 seconds per message and expect to get anything done.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about creating the filters to move mail here, as the people who read this could be using any number of different systems. The biggest thing to do, if you can, is to create these filters on the mail server itself rather than on your local client. This'll mean that all of the filtering is done before it gets to your local client if you're not using a web-based mail client, or to your smartphone. That way your inbox only shows you the most relevant messages.
What should the message be filtered on? Take a look at past messages you've received and see if they have a common thread. Is the "from" address always the same? Does the subject line always contain a particular block of text? Mailman mailing lists, by default, put some short string in the subject contained in brackets (like "[The List]").
I've included a screenshot of a sample filter I made in Zimbra Collaboration Suite to filter out some list emails.
