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Comment by mcmc | Hacker News Reader

What's the point? How many people actually keep fewer than 10k unread messages in their inbox?

I have none. I have a complex series of filters which direct mailing lists, automated emails, etc into separate labels which bypass the inbox. If it makes it to my inbox, it's important enough to be read quickly -- this generally means only about 50-100 emails a day.

Wow. 50-100? I filter down to less than 10 a day. Either I'm much more aggressive with my filtering or you are far more of an important person than I am.

I'm tidy. I don't have any. My wife on the other hand...

I think you either have 0 or 10K+.

I don't know how people can withstand that. At 1k+ messages you might as well declare email bankruptcy and regain a meaningful counter.

I've done this twice now. I'm sure there was some important stuff in my "Archive all unread emails" click, but I sure as hell wasn't going to check.

If you use Priority Inbox it will show you the number of unread messages in that, not in your normal inbox.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html

How many people actually keep fewer than 10k unread messages in their inbox?

Most people.

If you have 10k+ unread messages, it's time to introduce some filters to mark them as read.

In addition to my normal commit and mailing filters, I set up one filter called "Non-direct" that's effectively "something that's not addressed directly to me and doesn't fall under any other filter." That means that the only things that show up in my inbox are emails directly relevant to me.

It turns out I only get around 5 personal e-mails a day out of the 100+ I actually get. Which could be read either way :).

Multiple inboxes and filters are from Heaven. Pretty sure that my unread message count is directly related to how busy/crazy my life is at the moment.

I NEVER have more than 5 unread messages in my inbox. I have TONS that get filtered and archived to various labels but those are all mailing lists etc. But my inbox never has more than 5 unread messages and maybe 2-3 deal with soon messages.

Unless of course I go on vacation and then I have an hour or two to get back to NORMAL.

I user Gmail's "Priority In-box" feature and my priority section never has more than 5-10. Sometimes I let the other part get a little unruly when I am busy. I did use the option to add a section for "unread" messages before the rest of the mailbox.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I think there are quite a few of us who have at least a thousand unread messages. I have all kind of git commit messages that show up in my inbox that I don't always mark as read, not to mention all the mailing lists I subscribe to that aren't all in filters....

Commit messages and successful build/test messages automatically get set to read by a filter for me.

I currently have 9 emails in my Inbox total, and that's a lot for me.

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