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Poll: How many emails do you have in your inbox right now?

32 points by byoung2 ↗ HN
Just curious to know what other inboxes look like. I'm guessing you have more than one account, so to make the math easy, just go with the account that has the most, and include both read and unread messages, and those in folders, if the folders are in the inbox.

51 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
DrStalker
I keep my inbox empty so I don't have to spend mental energy going over the same messages every time I look at my inbox; mail should be read and then deleted, moved to "Action required" or moved to the archive.

My "Action Required" folder has a few dozen things that need a followup and my archived mail folder is just short of 30k.

hexleo
I don't agree with you. Unless your mail volume is too small. In my work, sometimes I need to search some important mails long before. You read a message and it's not important in the current, you delete it, but someday you found this message can help you and you can't find it. You will crazy. Because it happened to me.
jimktrains2
He never said he deletes messages, just that they aren't in his inbox.

I archive things I may want to search later, and star and leave in my inbox things I need to do later. Once they are done, they get archived. Often the inbox has no emails, but my account has 6k+

kennu
I started doing exactly the same thing about a year ago and I'm very happy about it. I immediately click either "Archive" or "Trash" on all messages that don't need a response, so I currently only have 7 emails in my inbox waiting for action. It's mentally quite relaxing.
mostly_harmless
I feel that 1-99 should be broken down into a more granular scaling.

something like: 1-10, 10-40, 40-100

robertfw
I agree - there is a big difference in process between maintaining < 10 and maintaining < 100 (i am at 10 right now and it feels full)
mrmondo
Totally agree, I don't like to see my inbox get over 10-15 items as they're all things I need to follow up on at some point, everything else gets archived.
Swizec
This is actually a tough question.

The only part of my inbox that I consider as my inbox is "Important and Unread", this currently has 30 emails. When an email is marked as read, I consider it archived, but it's technically still in my inbox.

Then there's the rest of my inbox (the unread part), which didn't make it through Gmail's algorithms for importantness. This probably has thousands of emails.

Then there are all the folders and filters which are also technically part of my inbox, but email that goes straight there never makes it into what I practically consider my inbox. So I have no idea how many there are. A casual glance tells me they contain between 500 and 2000 emails each. As far as I'm concerned these emails don't exist.

So! My technically inbox contains about 7gigs of email as per what Gmail tells me. My actual inbox contains 30.

What do I click on the poll?

byoung2
In gmail, I clicked on inbox, and then the checkbox for all messages, and that gave me 36k+. For this poll, go with the highest count.
Swizec
Oh wow, 55k+
paraserv
Over 101,000 in gmail's all mail. Inbox only has 40 emails, so depends on the definition here since we're talking labels/meta vs traditional folders.
kretor
All messages includes archived messages. That's not what the poll asks for.
byoung2
All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 36,358 conversations in Inbox

That's what I was looking for in the poll

emehrkay
My inbox only tells me how many are unread. Whats the point of moving read emails to another folder?
hayksaakian
Visual de-clutter to improve focus and remove distractions I suppose.

I don't do that, but its what I hear.

cpncrunch
So how do you know which ones still need to be dealt with?
nilkn
If you've read an email, decided it needs action, decided you won't take that action now, and decided you need a way to remind yourself to take that action later, wouldn't it make sense to just star that one email rather than move away all the rest?

I don't really know. My inbox has everything from ever in it.

[dead] phillijw
I just mark mine as Unread if I need to read them again.
Groxx
Mark as unread or move to a different system. Email has always seemed terrible for GTD (to any degree), as you can't easily attach metadata.
marssaxman
No idea how many are in folders - I wouldn't consider the folders to be part of the inbox.
daurnimator
344 in my inbox. which is essentially things I want to address, but haven't got around to doing yet.

The oldest entry is from march 2012.

For the record, the total is ~47000, and date back to 2007

abruzzi
I don't delete, and don't file to other folders. I trust Apple mail's search feature to find emails when I need to dredge them up. I don't find it's distracting, because I've trained myself to only pay attention to the blue dot. I just recently passed 20k on my work email. If I combined all my inboxes, I'd be well over 30k.
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cpncrunch
So how do you find the emails that you've read but not dealt with yet?
plorkyeran
I just mark them as unread. I don't find it useful to distinguish between "read but not dealt with yet" and "unread".
cpncrunch
So what if you marked it read a month ago? Do you trawl through pages and pages of emails multiple times a day to find the unread ones? Or do you filter by unread?
plorkyeran
Yes, I filter by unread. The end result is essentially equivalent to mails being automatically moved from the inbox to an archive when read (with a button to move it back).
bradleyland
In most cases, I don't rely on my email inbox to track tasks. If an email requires follow up, I flag/star it and move on to the next email, circling back to handle the follow up whenever I intend. If it's something I don't anticipate handling that same work-day, I add a task to Things (https://culturedcode.com/things/) so I don't lose sight of it. You could just as easily use something like Wunderlist (https://www.wunderlist.com/en/) or even your smartphone's reminder/task list utility.

The key is to keep the list simple. I drop these "daily" tasks on a task queue, ordered by priority. If I find something slipping down the queue too far (which implies it's been there too long), I'll either delegate it, or fire off a quick email to the person letting them know that I received their message, but haven't been able to take action on it.

When I explain this to people, they insist that they're far too busy to handle their inbox/task flow like this. IMO, this is a good indication that you're overcommitted. If you can't keep a simple list of the things you need to do, then you're over-burdened, and you need some help. That or you're simply kidding yourself.

wambotron
My inbox has everything in it. From .. ever.
byoung2
I'm the same way...when you don't have to worry about running out of space or senders getting a "recipient's inbox is full" error, you don't delete.
byoung2
My gmail account has 36,358, with 6745 unread. I am using 5.5GB of storage space for gmail alone. I think gmail created this problem by giving me virtually unlimited space. Now there is little incentive to delete old emails. I just wish the search was better.
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cjbarber
Zero, and it feels great.

I abide by the inbox zero philosophy from GTD.

To be clear, I don't process emails instantly, but I processed recently and thus am at zero.

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dsuth
950+, and I also subscribe to the zero inbox philosophy :S Time to get organised (again).
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schrodinger
I am anti inbox zero. I think archiving email is busy work, I'd rather star the ones I DO need than spend all day archiving everything else.
sigil 

    $ find ~/Maildir/inbox -type f | wc -l
    31439
That's after filtering out bulk mail and mailing lists. I'm a gmail user multiple times over, but use mutt + IMAP instead of webmail, which I visit once in a blue moon to do a tricky search.

Yeah, I should probably practice Real Inbox Zero, but mutt's new message flag is usually good enough. It's nice having new messages in full threaded context. To get Inbox Zero in mutt, with full threads for each new message, I guess I'd have to switch to something like mutt-kz [1]. (If anyone has pointers here, I'm all ears.)

Also:

    $ find ~/Maildir/read -type f | wc -l
    53774
I've got archived mail dating back to 2006. Every once in a while I take old messages from 'inbox' and move them to 'read' to make things more manageable.

It's a pretty low-tech setup. There are surely lots of fancy things I'm missing out on. Having all your mail locally and in a hackable format inside Maildirs lets you do some pretty interesting stuff though. For example, here's a shell one-liner that generates a time series of my mail volume (gnuplot tail not included): https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080

[1] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz

Apreche
Total - 11,672 Unread - 0
igaape
13,988 Account 1

3078 Account 2

7855 Account 3

831 Account 4

sidcool
Microsoft Outlook search (with Exchange server) is not as good as Google or Apple's email search. I can't use any other client owing to company restrictions. I have to organize emails into folders. So my inbox is pretty much clean. Has around 300 odd emails.
xwowsersx
A policy I adopted a long time ago is that when my inbox get overwhelming, I just archive everything. I know its sounds crazy, but my feeling is that if it's really important, it'll find it's way back to me.
mdisraeli
Working in a major shared service provider, supporting multiple large client organisations, and having risen up through the ranks. It should come as no surprise that the single most common and heavily used workflow system is email, and my work inbox root folder alone is over 22k emails.

If you're working on any form of workflow supporting software, make sure that email integration is at the heart. Like it or not, your biggest competitor within Enterprises is often not Excel documents, but Exchange.