How do you deal with email overload?

Emails get overloaded, we receive a huge amount of e-letters, promotions and notifications while most of them get burned.

I personally like exploring different services, digital products or blogs and tend to sign up with my email to receive occasional updates. Same as many others here on Indie Hackers I assume.

Often, most of the received emails are not very relevant and it’s not terrible missing them. But some are important or interesting though due to a high volume of all emails I don’t get to check them.

Gmail has some functionality to automatically filter important emails, promotions etc. But for me personally it’s not a very suitable solution as various incoming mails from different services can have different importance or level of interest. For example, I’m more interested to stay up-to-date with coming updates about technology and not that much about sport. But what happens is that less interesting emails get stacked up together with emails that have higher interest to me.

Of course, one way is to go through the mailbox on a regular basis, mark emails as spam/important/add labels etc. But it’s a very manual and time-consuming activity. I’m looking for a more automated solution that will help to keep things organized. Ideally, I would prefer to have automatic labeling or categorisation of emails by topics and/or prio.

Curious if others have these issues and how you deal with them.