How many personal unread emails do you have?
A lot of mine are from Linkedin, and stuff I’ve subscribed to over the years but don’t really care about, Like Plenty of Fish, and well, Linkedin.
(My work email is up to date and always will be.)
You?
Zero. I read or delete them a few times a day.
An ex of mine maxed it out. It eventually says “99,999+”.
In my Yahoo account I’m at 29,000 or more. Most of them are spam from companies with whom I do business. Every now and then I scan to try and find emails I actually care about and do a bunch of “opt outs”. it doesn’t seem to help though.
So I use the Yahoo email as my trash account and my gmail as my legit account. Lately, I’ve been thinking I might need a third just for friends.
None. Everything I don’t want to see goes to Junk. Anything I might want to see but am not really into at the moment gets “Mark as Read”.
- I feel like such an underachiever!
I was wrong. It’s over 38,000.
eyelid twitching
Carry on, y’all.
has a stroke
Zero. I delete and purge every day. Every account.
You must be related to my wife. Her copy of Outlook has crashed due to the number of emails in her inbox (the vast majority of which are unread). Then she retired and handed the problem over to her successor and her IT folks.
You know the bar on the right of your inbox that tells you how far down you are in your email list? Hers was a line.
I use Thunderbird with six primary domain accounts, each of which has a few aliases, and one GMail account. I tend to file important emails like account welcomes with all the key information, and a select set of business emails. Otherwise they sit in my inbox and I used to try and clear it out every week or two… but I’ve gotten lazy and there’s about 3800 in there, probably ten of which are actually ones I should read and deal with. It’s just easier to leave the questionable or unfinished ones there. (I don’t get much spam because I use disposable addresses for almost all public things.)
Mrs. B., on the other hand… developed the terrible habit of using email as her PIM, filing nearly every email and attachment even when it represented (as it did for a long time) multiple copies of the same Word document sent back and forth for edits. Her email backup file was well over 4GB last time I did one. I patiently told her at intervals over the years that this is a Very Bad Practice, since email database management is not meant to be strained that hard and is fragile. Sure enough, she’s lost whole folders and at least once or twice, nearly everything in her “files.” But she keeps doing it… to the point where she stopped having me oversee her tech, went to an all-Apple platform, and is now flying solo. I just smile when she rages and curses at the latest avoidable mishap. And I only have to smile until the divorce is final. I can’t even say that this nonsense isn’t part of what led to the divorce.
So I have no apologies for my semi-sorted 3800 or so emails. 
I have 82 from back when my main account. Was a secondary to a vanity account. Think tokyo@
grrr. tokyo@bayer.com.
The gmail account is now strictly work and personal. I use an old hotmail account for everything else and they have great cleanup features.
First you should use an email service which weeds out spam like Gmail (and definitely not like Yahoo).
You might do a search [entire message] for “unsubscribe” of your Inbox and start unsubscribing.
This is my approach. If I don’t need it, I dump it.
I have 27 email accounts with various services going back to the mid-90’s. Each one had several thousand unread emails last time I check in the mid-00’s. So probably more by now. I’ve never read a single email. If it’s not important enough to talk to me about then it’s a waste of my time.
I have never actually looked at my Gmail box. I had to set it up for some reason that I’ve forgotten. I wonder what’s in there?
I just checked my inbox. I guessed I had less than 30 emails in it. Boy, was I wrong. It has 30.
4 of them “unread”. I’ve actually read them but marked them “unread” to highlight them in case I need to refer to them soon.
I’ve had this account since the 90s.
I just don’t understand people leaving hundreds of emails in their inbox. Delete them or move them into a suitable folder (and clear out those folders from time to time).
Zero, not counting what goes straight to the junk or spam folder.
I have zero unread out of 33,706 in my All Mail folder (so it includes archived mail). Zero unread out of 860 in my Inbox.
Zero. I read them as I receive them and archive or trash as appropriate.
I’ve got a complex system of filters in place so most email gets labeled and routed to a particular folder automatically, some of them are programmed to be marked “read” immediately and archived so I don’t ever even have to look at them (mostly of the “political-action-alert” type).