> As soon as transactional emails and marketing mailer scripts start to take over, or long-running CC noise, it's hopeless and fighting it's not worth the time. Forget about it and rely on search.

The alternative, which works very well for me, is to have a whitelist and only allow that to hit your inbox. Then allow humans to get on to your whitelist:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...

It's trivial to filter out the noise, because by default it filters everything out. You do a tiny amount of work to whitelist the humans.

Inbox Zero definitely works with that setup.