Back in the day when I worked at AMZ, email was such a fundamentally broken form of communication that I ended up abandoning it altogether. A month or two before I left, I decided to delete all my unreads (just the unreads) and I think the tally was something like 65,000+.
i just use one email address for pretty much everything, and just sort the important shit i need for work, etc, into their own folders, so the main inbox is almost always mostly unread and i couldn't care less. d-:
as a creative professional i am great at being paid to organize other peoples' shit but when it comes to my own, half the time i just can't be arsed. lol