[Closed] How many unread emails in your inbox?

None. I use my inbox as pretty much my to-do list

At work about 200. But mainly all where I’m cc’d.

3. They are things I need to respond to.

154 I use my inbox pretty-much as my to-do list

None. Multiple mailboxes, personal and work. All up to date.

The filing system under those mailboxes however leaves a lot to be desired...

None, but I'm not very important....

Edit: I have 239 unread in my deleted items!

One and it's just Cambridge Wireless News.

Get very little work email, only a few each day!

Mainly communicate via chat in Teams / Skype.

Work currently 28 did have 350 this morning.

Damn week off😛

Gmail loads as in 1000s.

None

Doesn't mean I've replied to them though! My usual policy is if it's important they'll chase me again! 🙂

4786 right now.

Hmm. I am quite shameful in this area.
My 3 inboxes are
work: 1479 unread
BT mail: 2550 unread
GMail: 11926 unread
total : 15995
please don't judge me, I'll catch up with them one day 😥

3 but I never file anything. That's what search is for. So have 1000s and 1000s of emails going back about 5 years. I suppose I could go and cull the really old ones, but I'm way too lazy for that 🙂

Main work inbox 1,644
Sub inboxes approx 300+
Gmail #1 - 3,357
Gmail #2 - 2,334

I've got a data transfer account with 31k+ unread emails, but that's a bit different

Less than ten usualy.
As above anything in my inbox requires action.
Everything else either gets immediately binned or moved to a relevant sub folder for future reference.

7859. I've no idea why, you've prompted me to do some housekeeping!

Currently 32K unread on my Hotmail, was iro 100K after years of neglect but I clicked 'mark all as read' by accident. Had to delete a load recently to stay under 10Gb space limit.

Yahoo stops counting at 9,999, and I hit that years ago.

Anything that doesn't interest me doesn't get opened. Anything that's needs action gets added to the to do list.

Edit: I can't even read the bloody question properly 🙄

My gmail has 100,540 unread 😎
Work, a bit lower

total : 15995

Holy crap!  That's insane

24,378 according to my phone
It needs a bit of a tidy.

17,318 unread.

Inbox is not a todo list or prioritisation tool for me.

All I can say is that anything I want to deal with gets prioritised using a mix of Notion, Jira & Slack.

My main email is very tidy, rarely gets above 10 unread emails.

The Gmail address I set up a year ago for job searches and applications has over 20,000. When you have sites like Total Jobs, Reed etc generating emails 2-3 times a day plus every company you apply to sending their newsletters etc it quickly piles up! There's over 100 from just this morning. I'll be so glad when I find permanent work and can close that one down.

I also have an email address to use for signing up to sites for free stuff etc and that regularly hits it's storage limit and needs a clear out every month or so.

14 in my personal Gmail, all read but marked unread as I need to keep or do something with them.

Currently in the middle of 2 weeks leave from work, so I dread to think, having made the mistake of checking the team WhatsApp the other day- not even sure what role I'm going back to as resources have reallocated, apparently.

personal - 36,673
work -815 , I thought it was about 50 , I should really do something about them

Are we talking about unread or in total? My figures were purely unread, the total number in the inboxes are 10x that

Work: 3300
Play: 5200:

I don't worry about unread emails. I get a lot of automatic ones from servers each day. If it really matters people send multiple reminders, not to mention calendar blocks for activities.

I did previously have failure emails coming in from one of our systems and it went a bit mental over Christmas, when I came back from my holidays I had 25,000 emails .It took 4 hours to open and another 4 to delete them

One. And that's as a reminder I've to write something this week.

Stuff is read, deleted if unimportant or archived if worth keeping. GMail makes everything so easy to find that I don't bother much with folders these days.

600+ at work. And that's with me being diligent at clearing stuff. None of it is from me having had a recent holiday - it's just people at me. Gmail, something silly like 20,000+ but nobody cares about that.

Work: 15089
Hotmail: 17809

Work - 4 - all things I need to do
GMail - 0 - just tidied it up
Hotmail - 1224 - it would be more but I have GMail filter important stuff out so it actually gets read

The wife has around 20k unread across 3 accounts. Drives me mad. Don't even get me started in her 99+ open tabs on Chrome on her mobile.

None currently but old job was 4500+, I see that as a target to be beaten

45. Will be cleared by end of day.

If I am cc'd in, it is deleted.

I do not subscribe to any 'updates' or marketing emails. Ruthlessly.

Holy crap! That’s insane

Just slightly doolally in comparison, it seems 😀

Indeed, I spoke too soon, eh?

Wow, some of the numbers on here...I mean I can see folk can ignore the auto-generated stuff, (but then; set a rule up you monster) but really apart from that, how do you sleep at night?

I saw my managers email inbox on a teams call today, it had 67000 emails in it. I have 50.

30 unread as some of them are just information spam.

Sleep at night? It's just email. If it's that important, people phone or stroll over to my desk or catch me when I am out on site.

Zero unread.

I have become ruthless. Having gigabytes of nonsense being stored on a server requiring power is rediculous so I am steady block deleting old crap aswell.

Zero unread here too, unsubscribe from most shite and am fairly unimportant in the scheme of things at work 🙂

Rocketmail account (ask your grandparents) which is my main personal account, 0. In fact there's no read e-mails in there, it's just stuff I need to do.

Main work one, 15, these are just adverts and assorted crap I can't be bothered to delete.
Second work one, it's a legacy e-mail address I hardly ever read, 488 unread, used to bother me, couldn't give a monkey's now. I've only got it because I've got accounts for stuff tied to it.

None at all, don't have a use for email except when ordering stuff online,

I think we nee da major shift away from email in the workplace, it is an antiquated tool which absorbs far too much time. Mostly it is just overused by people who do not trust their colleagues so want an over the top audit trail

Hopefully Teams and the like take a a front seat and push email into history.

696

Hopefully Teams and the like take a a front seat and push email into history.

We only adopted it during the first lockdown but I already have a substantial disliking of Teams. Maybe it'd be better if it was used differently but too many people post stuff but don't notify anyone, so then I am unaware of the thing that was an action in the thing they posted so it doesn't get done and I end up getting a chaser email to ask why I haven't done something I was unaware of.

Anyhow 1 undead email in my work inbox, which I resurrected because it was something I need to do
Zero in my personal email

I also had a clearout of my work inbox a while ago and deleted everything pre 2018, but there are still 1870 emails in there that are unfiled. Should probably do something about that too.

I could sort mine out, the new ones anyway - mostly, on the personal emails it's new music releases.
I usually go through them, but Bandcamp ones are rather numerous. I have a complete FOMO madness when it comes to new music. Tried shaking it, but to no avail.
Work is mostly auto-generated stuff from the help system. I could set up a rule, but 4 years ago, I wasn't sure if I'd need to refer back to these emails on occasion. Turns out, I don't, so I'll set up a rule now, thanks to this thread 😀

I have a system at  home with all my wife's subscribed newsletters (we share a mailbox) where I start filtering them to a sub folder if they stop being opened.  It makes it easier to manage

With work stuff I don't get managers who want to be CCd on things but never open them because they are too busy.  You have to trust your staff and stop them CCing things to you.  It isn't covering anyone's arse

 so then I am unaware of the thing that was an action in the thing they posted so it doesn’t get done

I'm pretty sure you can set Teams to send you a summary of notifications you haven't responded to each day.   I think it is under the notifications settings - either banner or banner and email.  Teams rocks

44299 at present
Of those 99% will be completely irrelevant - things people cc'd me on I didn't need to be, automated messages from the system telling me that a document has been updated; automated reports which I only need if I want to investigate something etc. Marketing BS etc. The other 1% will phone me (or teams/slack) or send a reminder.

If on average each one of those took me 1 min to open, skim, decide what to do with, file, I would have spent 6 months of my working life reading pointless email. Thats time I can spend here instead!

Top tip - delete every single work email received on holiday.

If it's important they'll tell you in person

I get a lot of automatic ones from servers each day.

I have rules which mean they never touch my inbox and just go to a server specific folder which I very rarely look in!

62,347 unread email in my inbox

I got to 15k on my work email, marked them all as read, made no odds. Back to nearly 10k now. Identifying the ones you need to read isn't hard and a lot of them I read in the right hand panel without opening them

For those people with 10,000 unread emails and suggesting if it is important they will send a reminder - how will you spot the reminder in amongst all the other stuff you never open?

I have always managed email very well as it is a primary communication method for me. Get a few hundred a day and never have anything unread by time I finish work. I have a lot of rules running so if I get a type of emails I don't want to see (from person, from list, from title etc,.) it gets automatically sent to Deleted.

For those people with 10,000 unread emails and suggesting if it is important they will send a reminder – how will you spot the reminder in amongst all the other stuff you never open?

Email subject line (or top three lines of preview - my own team are well trained to make sure that the relevance/importance is obvious there as I'm not opening it unless it's clearly for me and asking something). Notifications on phone/desktop mean its infrequent that an email comes in without me being aware something was sent; its rare that two emails come in without getting any attention, but it does happen. If they don't get an answer they can phone, text, slack, teams me as necessary. I'm sure some people find me incredibly rude - I'm also sure I find some of the crap I get copied on an invasion of my time. Some people's email will more likely get attention just from who they are.

I also generally don't bother accepting meeting invites which really seems to upset people!

I’m not able to upload screenshots as proof but Mrs LDM is currently on 252973, gives me the willies!

Probably well over 200k, all inboxes considered. I can filter fairly effectively on sender/subject.

How much time would it take me to go through 200k emails? That's how much time I've saved myself over the years.

Personally I find it a bit odd when people get panicky about having a lot of emails, and really weird when people start using email as a measure of work.

Zero. dont get me wrong, i certainly dont read them all!! but cannot stand having unread messages in my inbox (ctrl A 'mark as read')

people with thousands, why not just delete all and start again?

anything important will be in touch again, you can deal with them as & when, one by one.

If they don’t get an answer they can phone, text, slack, teams me as necessary. I’m sure some people find me incredibly rude

I would be one of them. I send you a mail because you need to do something or are the only person who can answer. An email is an efficient way of doing that but you ignore that and then waste my time having to chase it up with another email and then eventually phone, text, slack etc,. not knowing whether you will bother responding to any of those either.
Answering a mail for something that you are accountable for would seem like the thing you should do.

I also generally don’t bother accepting meeting invites which really seems to upset people!

That is pretty ****y too. If you are not going to go to the meeting then decline it.

people with thousands, why not just delete all and start again?

anything important will be in touch again, you can deal with them as & when, one by one.

But why? Not everyone has to manage things the same way as you.

I would be one of them. I send you a mail because you need to do something

...but not in a hurry. If someone wants something done this afternoon, or tomorrow, or maybe even this week then find some other way to get in touch. (Like Teams - ugh, phone, actually seeing someone in person, chucking a paper plane across the office, whatever)

Zero

Have lots of filters to move most to specific folders/mailboxes. That sort of prioritises them for me. Some get block marked as read or deleted, others (there were two this morning) have attachments that need assessing and responding to. Only really builds up if I've been away on holiday, even then it's probably only half an hour at most to deal with a couple of weeks' backlog.

Used to get masses at work - build systems and bug tracking systems generate near spam proportions of email. Online purchase generate a lot, ordered something from CRC the other day:
one email from CRC to confirm order
one email from Hermes to say they are awaiting delivery of the order
one email from CRC to say it's been dispatched
one email from Hermes to say they have the package
one email from Hermes to say it's out for delivery
one email (yet to arrive) to say it's been delivered.

The only one that needs to stay on my computer is the first, even then I could just look at my account history on CRC, the rest can be deleted once the package arrives.