Selfhosted

I can recommend the Spark Desktop email client, you can use it for free and without subscribing.

I’m not self hosting email but my rule is that no email gets to be in the inbox except for VERY rare exceptions

When an email lands in my inbox, I immediately make a rule that labels it correctly and moves it the fuck away from my inbox.

This way I can have notifications on for inbox emails and they’ll either be important or a new sender whose next email will end up labeled and NOT in my inbox

but I'm absolutely drowning in unread emails, around 4,000

WTF are you doing with your e-mail address that you get these amounts of mails. These are more mails than I got in the last decade.

At first maybe try to unsubscribe whatever you subscribed and stop putting your address into random services. Use a temporary mail for stuff like that.

Also mail filters can help with sorting mails from certain senders into folders. Bascially every provider has them and if not programs like Thunderbird have these built in on the client side.

Most are those annoying notifications like "Your security code is xxx," "Your parcel has shipped," and requests to rate my experience.

Uhm simply delete them when you e.g. inputted the code or got your parcel? Or change the settings that you no longer get them?

So, I’m on the hunt for an email provider that has solid SPAM filters...

Under your circumstances no provider in the world can do that, because nobody can determine if your "Your security code is xxx" mail is spam or legitimate... YOU have to determike that for yourself.

Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word "unsubscribe" in it's body to another folder saves your sanity. It's still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you're subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.

I use my own version of inbox zero.

I manually archive emails I might need in the future (like rent payment confirmations, job position applications that got past the screening interview, official correspondence with local administrative bodies, and very few other things).

I keep things that need action or are ongoing in the inbox (like online orders until they arrive, event tickets).

I delete useless emails (newsletters, code confirmations, online order emails or event tickets once the order arrives or the event passed) possibly preceded by unsubscribing.

That’s it, I usually have 0 to 3 emails in my inbox. No plugins, no filters.

How about using sieve rules? A nice plus is that if you ever move to self-hosted in the future, you can bring it with you.

I know at least Fastmail supports user-configured sieve. I don't have experience with Fastmail myself but in general mostly heard good things.

https://www.cstrahan.com/blog/taming-email-with-fastmail-rules/

http://sieve.info/tutorials

I use the Thunderbird email client to set up filters which send email to set folders.

You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.

One of these can just be solved with a mailbox rule within the email client itself for what it’s worth. Make a rule that’s based on keywords in the subject line and have them moved into a folder that you clear out every couple of months. Downside is the email client need to be running/opened for it to process them.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #988 for this comm, first seen 9th Jan 2026, 10:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Get a proton mail. The complete plan not only supports custom domains, they also let you create unlimited alias.

This is the best thing ever. Alias work with custom domains too and they basically give you an endless amount of single-use emails allowing you to sign to each service/website with a different email (that will then be forwarded to your inbox).

This not only leaves your real email safe and unexposed, but it also lets you organize your inbox more tidily if your aliases have a structure and you use email rules for them (e.g. you can create aliases for your shipping stuff called [website].shipping@[myalias].com and then make a rule including all the adresses .shipping to a specific folder).

This is not strictly a self hosting answer, but given the problem you are describing, I think it is still relevant.

If you are already comfortable using an LLM based tool to manage email, take a look at SaneBox (this is not an LLM).

It is not an email provider and not an email client. It sits behind the scenes and works with almost any provider that supports IMAP, including custom domains. All the filtering, prioritization, and notification cleanup happens server side, so you keep your existing setup.

It excels specifically at what you are struggling with: automatically separating real human email from receipts, shipping notices, one time codes, and low value notifications, without forcing you into Inbox Zero workflows or Gmail specific features.

I have elaborate Procmail rules that sort out the mail. It's not a very modern solution and the syntax is quite horrible, but it works quite well.

This probably won't help you much, but Apple Mail has this feature regardless of the server.