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

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

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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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'm doing trial periods at fastmail, zoho and namecheap (fronting for titan ).
Zoho will fail back to a low volume, web only version if the bill doesn't get paid while the others just stop working.

Those were pretty much the top three I found across all the "top 10" reviews I could find -- aside from the ones that obviously cater to spamming (marketing) customers.

Would love to see reasons for/against them.

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.

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.

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).