So. Time to listen to some music and cull the over 21,000 emails resting in my GMail box.
Signed into GMail online. Over the last few days, I’ve slowly been working through them. It’s quick work, since ( like most of us, I suspect ) 80-90% of all incoming email is advertising from vendors I’ve used and have given my email address to.
Here’s what I cannot figure out. The Inbox count, on the upper left, has slowly rolled back from around 21,000 to 15,000 +/- right now.
However, on the upper right, reads a small box that says " 1-100 of 21, 345 ". As though I’ve not deleted ANYTHING.
Yeah, I did empty the Trash just now and logged out and logged back in, wondering if that would properly re-set this counter. No luck.
Why is that counter not showing the accurately reduced email count in my In Box??
Because that shows how many in the page. As you delete, your total goes down, but the number of messages per page remains the same. Once you get below 100 messages, that number will be smaller.
If you have 500 messages and you’ve set your inbox to show 100 messages per page, you’ve got five pages. If you delete75, your first page will read 1-100, but your lady page will read 401-425. Delete fifty more and you’ll only have three pages of messages: 1-100,101-200, 201-300, and 301-325.
As I understand it, Google stores and indexes your mail in funny ways in order to speed your access to it. The counter in the upper right is a guess based on the current search, which, when you’re looking at your inbox, is “label: inbox”. It’ll update when their system has cause to reindex the search, which you don’t have a lot of control over. Going a few pages deep, deleting a lot of messages, or just waiting some time might all cause the search to update.
The counter on the left is more accurate, as I understand, because it’s actually counting, and not based on the search process. You can watch the counter on the right update by searching for something that will return a few pages of messages. As you click through each page, the estimate of total number of messages will change.
If by “Inbox count” you mean "the number just to the right of the word ‘Inbox’, that is just the number of unread messages in your inbox, while in the “x-y of z” text, z is the total number of messages, read and unread.
Is it possible that you are just marking the messages as read, rather than archiving/deleting them?
Do you get any different numbers you you explicitly type “in:inbox” into the gmail search bar?
Sometimes distributed systems have lags in updating counters, but I’m surprised that GMail would have such issues. 21000 emails is not “a lot” in the grand scheme of things.
As an aside: Have you considered using a client for this process? It might make it easier and faster for identifying messages for deletion, moving, archiving, etc. in bulk.
When I delete something from the Inbox, that number immediately goes down, reflecting the deletion. So if it that isn’t happening for Cartooniverse, then I wonder why.
That number in the upper right reflects the total number of messages, read and unread, of whatever folder you’re looking at in the moment. If you are deleting messages from folders other than the Inbox, such as the “Social,” “Updates,” or “Promotions” folders, the number in the Inbox folder won’t go down.