How many unread emails do you have?

[EQ Admin]

I never would have thought to ask this one, but I just saw a screen that listed almost 3500 unread emails.

How many unread emails do you have in a single account?

How many unread emails do you have across all of your accounts?

I have zero unread emails. Actually, I take that back.

I have some unread emails that get filtered to folders but I only look at those when needing to check statistical history, it's not required that I open and look at them daily.

 

[EQ Admin]

If you have a lot of unread email, why?

Is the spam filtering in front of your account not good?

Do you not care about unsubscribing from mailing lists?

 

[foggy]

Where was this list of unread emails? Was it as a part of a video tutorial on spam or something (where someone might have opened a dummy account to try to receive as much spam as possible)? Or was it someone's main, serious account?

Did he/she have any mail in any other folder, or just the inbox? (Or weren't the 3500 in the inbox?)

Could the person have merely marked all the messages as unread for some purpose?

I haven't received 3500 emails in my whole internet lifetime yet!

 

[THERESA]

The unread emails were mine on my phone. They are a yahoo account that I use for logging into fb and other sites that require an email to log in or sign up. I also use it for online orders etc.

Well Foggy, if you had my friends and family, you would have plenty of forwarded and spammy emails. I kept asking them not to send them to me and they ignored me and continued to do so. I no longer use an email address to keep in contact with anyone on a personal level. It is strictly for business. My kids and Ray are the only people that can email me.

Part of the problem is talked about here:

http://www.emailquestions.com/email...riends-sending-me-forwards-chain-letters.html


I am just really bad about deleting email. I skim it and if it's important, I open it. If it's not, it usually sits unopened. Once in awhile I go on a deleting spree. The fastest way to delete this many emails and not delete anything important is to use the method that I have used for years. I do a search for the name of a company that I have many emails for that I know are not important and I don't need any of them. (for example, my online pharmacy- as long as I don't have any medications that are in transit, I can safely delete all of them) I then select all for that search and delete them. Then on to the next company that I know I don't have any important emails from. I never end up deleting all of them because there are way too many emails and it's too time consuming but it cuts down quite a bit.

Here is my total across all of my accounts:

In my thunderbird account, I have 6,831 emails (51 are in my spam folder and this also includes many folders that have emails in them that are sorted also) This is the email total (not unread) Thunderbird doesn't tell me how many unread vs. total


In my yahoo accounts total-3571 unread LOTS more if you include read


Grand total 10,402 Yahoo unread and Thunderbird read and unread

 

[foggy]

Well, everyone approaches their email differently.

I remember reading this blogpost when it first came out at the WindowsTeamBlog: Are you a piler, a filer, or a deleter (or some combination thereof)?

Btw, the links to the charts in the above post don't work but I did find another chart which basically includes the same MS information here.

In my case, I'm all three: I definitely delete stuff I don't need (after a while), which is why my total store is barely 100mb! But I also file (or at least organize with color-coded tags/labels) where possible. And I'll pile email in an archive where the interface doesn't allow color-tagging. In the last case, I have to rely on searches to find anything.

Hey... whatever works for you, Theresa! At least you've found some way to keep some sort of control over things!

 

[THERESA]

Actually I think it's my ADHD that causes the email to get out of control like that. I make piles in real life of things too. You should see my computer desk.

So I'm a proud piler in every sense of the word. lol I can always find an email that I need though thanks to the search feature. I could never switch to an email that had a small to medium space limit. I would go over in no time.

 

[THERESA]

Yahoo's limit is 1 TB. I have over 3500 emails in there and no warnings so far.

 

[EQ Admin]

To clarify that 1TB means 1 TB of storage space. That doesn't translate into a specific number of maximum allowed individual emails. A TB is equal to 1,048,576 MB, or roughly 350,000 iTunes songs to help put those numbers in perspective.

 

[Big Dan]

I have two unread. Both are newsletters that I haven't gotten a chance to read. Right now I'm using Gmail's tabbed inbox. I generally read everything that comes in and delete anything I don't need.

Anything that I need to keep track of for a few days (projects, order receipts, etc) gets starred which places it in my main inbox. When the need to track something expires I unstar it which removes it from my inbox.

 

[EQ Admin]

I wasn't counting my spam folder. Technically I have 205 unread spams in my Gmail account right now.

 

[THERESA]

To clarify that 1TB means 1 TB of storage space. That doesn't translate into a specific number of maximum allowed individual emails. A TB is equal to 1,048,576 MB, or roughly 350,000 iTunes songs to help put those numbers in perspective.

I understood that it's storage and not number of emails. I was just putting it into perspective a little bit that 3500 doesn't trigger a warning. (since I think I am probably the exception to the rule and not many people have nearly as many emails saved as I do)