I have one personal email (posteo, 1 euro per month) that I use for personal correspondences, and one shitty personal email I signed up for in high school that I use for anything where there’s any chance it might make it to some corporate mailing list. I have the posteo address set up alongside work email to notify me when new mails come in, and the junk address I’ll login through firefox like every few days (unless I’m expecting something specific) to skim and mark the most recent mail as read so I know where to start skimming next time.
For work, anything I actually need to deal with I’ll mark as unread until I get around to it, because it’s annoying seeing the icon show I have unread messages. Sometimes “getting around to it” does just mean putting it in a calendar or some other way of making sure I don’t lose track.
I prefer to only use the inbox for anything that is unread that I haven’t read.
At work, we have to use outlook, which has a handy macro feature. I wrote wrote one to flag an email, mark it as unread, and move it out of my inbox into a different folder. That way it is out of my inbox, has a number indicating how many items I have left to complete, and is given priority over other emails. Use cases and email systems vary, but maybe something like that could help you
Bonus. If you are forced to use outlook against your will, you can benefit from the todo app. Any email you flag will be automatically put as a todo along with a link to the email.
