You're either the kind of person who reads their emails in real time and freaks if that little blue number ever reads "2" or you're the kind of person who selects their entire inbox and marks it as read twice a decade.
My wife is the former. I am the latter. I get too much junk. I go through my inbox a few times a day, read what looks important, and ignore the rest. I have 2,174 unread emails in my inbox and a folder called "auto junk" with 5,116 in it.
Pro tip: the checkbox at the top of the column only selects the first page worth (100 messages). You have to click that and then also click the "select all N messages?" link that appears.
See if your email provider lets you whitelist addresses. Every known sender goes to inbox, all the rest to trash. Great for keeping things tidy and helping to sniff out fake emails from eboy.