I'm terribly old-fashioned: When I subscribe to a mailing list, I create a folder and filter rules for it, so the messages can be safely ignored in future without interfering with my inbox. None of this use-the-search google rubbish.
I expect you use a desktop mail client too, right? I just use the Gmail web client, which doesn't have folders. You can filter stuff into categories with tags, but it doesn't actually move it from the inbox.
Most of the time. Sometimes I use a mobile mail client. Or webmail. Or a console mail client over SSH. Whichever is convenient.
The folders and filtering are server-side, so it's client-agnostic, and only the stuff I actually care about lands in the inbox. It's what we used to do before gmail was invented.
It works fine for me on the whole because I treat emails as ephemeral, not something to be archived.
It appears to work surprisingly well, at least until it doesn't. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether gmail has buried an email, or arbitrarily decided that it's spam, but if my interactions with gmail users are anything to go by, it's usually the latter. (I have a gmail account, but I've never really used its web interface other than for testing things - every time I go back it seems to have been re-designed.)
I note we have a whole generation of email users who've never used folders. Or a mail client. Until they get a job that inflicts Outlook on them.
Of course, they probably haven't used mailing lists either. I find that lists benefit from being quarantined until such a time as I can be arsed to read and/or search them. Like we used to do with newsgroups, and indeed still do with web forums and social media.
