My way of cleaning up the 1000’s of emails in my inbox usually involves sorting by sender. That makes it much easier to identify maillist bulk mail, etc.

Some people’s mails I can always just delete (the forwarded stuff from my grandfather), others can generally be bulk sorted for archiving (my husband sends me pretty much only useful links - save ‘em, my brother only holds short conversations, but will always phone if he wants to give real information - delete ‘em)

Besides, since I set up the Gmail archive trick, I guess I can always just nuke ‘em…