How to manage your mail comes down to what type of person you are. There’s a lot of great advice here for “Type A” people who don’t find it burdensome to follow a regimen, however simple, and keep things tagged/foldered/scheduled appropriately.
Type Bs might try that, have it work for a week, fall behind, and naturally let the process die. I’m that person.
What works for me is only caring about two kinds of messages: unread ones and starred ones. If I read a message and there’s something I need to do because of it, I click star. Instead of using my Inbox as-is, I make my main view a filter that only shows unreads at the top, and starred messages (newest to oldest) below. Messages I read but don’t star immediately disappear. Messages I unstar immediately disappear. Nothing is deleted because I rely heavily on search to give me a refresher about certain topics that came up anywhere from the day before to three years ago.
I’ve never been an Apple Mail user— my personal and work email accounts are both Gmail, and Mimestream on Mac supports the above workflow really nicely. It’s a native gmail client that uses the gmail API directly, so things like tagging and snoozing work when you need them, and the search isn’t trying to search gigs of messages on your local hard disk.
A handful of years back, JC Penney made a huge deal about stopping this practice in their stores, where everything is on “sale” all the time. Sales plummeted even though the actual product prices stayed the same. They immediately reversed course.
Hard to blame them. Human brains are weird.