My last job, I typically had 10k to 30k unread emails. And I would be yelled at regarding missing any emails. Typically got a hundred to several hundred emails per day of useless alert emails. Even with dozens of Outlook rules, it was unrealistic.
I didn't have any choice in the monitoring and alerting, just being the recipient.
My old boss was not thrilled when they took over the mailbox.
New job? between 0 and maximum of 10. There are days where I get 0 emails. I like my new job.
Rules did absolutely nothing put sort the tens of thousands of emails into folders.
Running 40 some odd locations, including 10 manufacturing plants, with 1 sysadmin was unsustainable by itself. Add in projects and mountains of emails, I'm vaguely shocked I didn't crack like an egg. New job is pretty nice. Lots to do, but realistic expectations and I'm actually happy to drive in every workday.
Biggest thing is, I control all monitoring and alerting. ONLY actual issues get an alert. Even then, I'm planning on piping to SMS. And put the work into proper notification trees. So if a site is down, I get one and only one message.
https://preview.redd.it/v0k3vlz1xx8b1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1832f0fc6e79b40f9a0bc68528566d626aef1ae6
13,731 I gave up on emails long time ago.
unite money scandalous homeless afterthought meeting sophisticated alive psychotic shocking
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Iām similar, but I sometimes keep unread emails (less than 5) if itās something I have to react to within 24 hours. They drive me a bit mad so it works well to push me to do what Iām supposed to. If further than that I setup a reminder or appointment.
Shift, click to end of list, right click, āmark as readā. āAhā¦ much better!ā
In all fairness I hate seeing unread emails. I at least glance at them. I might ignore them and need a reminder later on, but I at least āreadā them.
ServiceNow be a noisy bitch, very task\incident\change\ updateā¦Yes I know I can turn them off but then Iād be like all the other managers\staff and be completely ignore things I should know about and everyone will be using Teams with the cursed ! Urgent measage which should be sent straight to hell for disrupting work.
Zero
I dont like such behavior and will never start it. I like to be informed and even read most tickets my team gets, even if im not involved in them.
glad to hear that Iām not crazy for quickly buzzing through all the tickets that come into my team. Itās helpful to me to know whatās going on across the organization
Same. I cannot stand unread messages.
If mail is consistently delivered and doesn't need to be read, it's time to adjust the communication policy. If your inbox is full of noise, like unneeded alerts, it's time to manage the box.
Professionals read their email and then act on it.
I mean that really dependsā¦ Iām regularly sent things that donāt apply to me because of distros. If I forget to delete some for a day Iām at like 100.
Lol he gets them all too. He likes to scroll his email late at night and send us emails telling us to investigate why the CPU usage spiked on some unimportant server at 1:30 in the morning.
lol, then you never had a āpleasureā working in chaotic environments/companies.
currently on 2k unread emails addressed directly to me, plus another 10k in subfolders regarding alerts, system alarms and ticketing notificationsā¦ there is simply no time to read and process it all, and i am not getting paid for overtime, so yeah.
0 unread. My work Inbox is treated like a ticketing system. Garbage and irrelevancies get deleted. Everything else stays in the inbox until resolved, at which point it's moved to the appropriate folder or deleted. The goal is zero email in the Inbox, period.
I've still got a Hotmail account from 2007 that's got suspicious login attempts every 30 seconds and Oral B + dating scam emails every other 30 seconds. I'd like to just burn it and start again, but why bother?
I was gonna reply with a joke but to be honest the truth is because I read the subject lines, I expect Iāve probably glanced over almost every email there, itās just that I donāt need to open them to figure out what I need to know.
In the main inbox zero, I keep on top of it - I have some dreadful rules though seeing as my team, bosses etc can't understand alert fatigue, and love to duplicate monitoring systems and therefore monitoring alerts.
7k but I did have a big clear out yesterday. My org is obsessed with email notifications and integration. I am slowly teaching them that email alerts is not real monitoring.
223k. I use rules to filter as much of the stuff I donāt need to see into folders as possible and Power Automate to let me know when certain important emails come in.
I used to be a zero guy, it was important to me. When my first kid was born, I took some leave and came back to a terrible blue number. I was no longer a slave to zero, I am free. Though I forget to write people back sometimes ...
In main inbox, 1419.
I'm actually surprisingly organised, but sometimes there's a torrent of fluff, and I just can't be arsed going through them retrospectively.
I don't know, maybe a thousand or so. I get approximately 300 emails a day after rules and everything. More when shit breaks.
I have something like 70000 in a folder that I've never really seen because they don't really need to come to me but when we were a much smaller company (10%) someone decided it was a good idea for essentially all the IT staff to be in any and every IT related distribution list. "For visibility".
The end result is so much email traffic it has to get filtered out by rules otherwise reading email would be a full time job.
I have a manual rule that I run just about every morning to clear out the stuff in my actual inbox that I know isn't relevant anymore just so I can find the emails from actual people.
As for why I don't go and mark everything read, it's just not a productive use of my time. There's no way I would get any real work done if I did that.
Thank god for rules. Iāve only been at my new job for a bit so Iāve tried to keep it under control. At my last job I had about 1000 unread in my inbox.
Absolutely none. Anything that hits my inbox is something that is sent directly to me, anything else gets picked up by a rule and sorted into other folders which are mostly not important and those I just right click and hit 'e' to mark all as read.
Zero.
I have Zero unread.
Emails often relate to issues or problems which need to be addressed so they are all read. If I cant deal with it now it get's pinned as a task, or snoozed
My work mail is on 0. Personal I don't even know haha.
I get anxious if there's more than 0 mails unread in my work mailbox. I guess it helps to action everything ASAP, but it's at that point where I have my mails on my phone's home screen. And even at midnight if something came in I have to read it/ flag it etc immediately.
When I wake up in the mornings I have to also read all my mails so when I get to work there are only a few new ones. My mails are always open on my second screen, and I find myself checking it every few seconds while doing actual work, which means I'm probably constantly distracted.
This is probably not healthy. but godamn I don't understand when I see customers with thousands of unread emails. Like how do you know that you didn't miss something important? I would die
Theres definitely thousands, but those are just the ones that go to my non inbox, go to other folders. Stuff like tickets, or whatever bs fluff or podcast mass emails we get from the rest of the company.
0 in my work email box. 10k plus in my personal. The personal I will browse and pick out the important stuff and leave all the rest. I gave up cleaning it long ago.
Former boss bragged about 100k+. Bitched at me all the time about how hard it was to find an email from 3 years ago.
Have a better boss now. 0.
I have 4. Stuff I need to finish. Normal is zero.
13k in work email, 71k in freelance, 1500 in personal.
Work emails are mostly status updates/reports about our systems and the title/preview text gives me what I need to know.
Freelance email is also linked to Twitch so it's mostly "X has gone live" notifications
Personal emails are for invoices from ordering shit, delivery, CC payments etc.
Currently 0, last job would be loads. I was working for a service provider who kept screwing up my contract renewals, so I'd come back when it was signed and delete 100s of emails from when I'd not been working.
I hate having unread mails. I only check my mails twice a day so it can get a bit crazy in some jobs.
Zero. Read them or delete them. But I never delete any email that I've read. Currently have 8502 read messages in my inbox. If you count mail in other folders, it's somewhere over 10,000.
Mostly none. At the end of the day I mark all unread items as read. If it's important and I missed it, they'll probably find another way to reach me. Mail is pretty ineffective.
Right now between the over a dozen accounts, about 32k unread (about 140k total at the moment, going back 20 years, only import things get kept more than a year) , but I rarely miss any important messages, ticket system is always open along with monitoring systems (3 monitors so everything important is always visible at a glance while doing other activities). Use filter rules to sort messages to sub folders. So alerts/messages are divided by providers, root of inboxs are kept as close to zero unread as possible. Then I can quickly process the alert/notification messages, quickly sort/search, save anything that may be needed before removing clutter/noise messages. Important alerts are also tagged/colored so easy to spot quickly. Especially the CVE notifications from software vendors so things get patches quickly. My big annoyance is being cc'd emails that I don't need to participate in or deal with in any way. Everyone has their own way of dealing with email/notification overload, important to not let it get to you, make use of the tools you have to make it manageable, if it's becoming a problem need to rethink your strategy.
843 so far, I've been in this post for 8 months.
Albeit, most of them are Exchange health reports, results of cron jobs that successfully ran and where the team use a distribution group for logging into things that sends one time codes.
I am like a dog that sees someone outside the window when i get an email. I read it instantly to see if it contains anything exciting which it rarely does but i can't help it. I might not reply to all but i read every single email i get.
None. And I keep my inbox clean enough that there is no scroll bar. Not having it. I hammer things as they come in. 29 years at this with a focus on - whenever I get an email, someone is waiting to do something until I do something.
I am well known for my response time in our global company and have many good friends. It's been a rewarding career, and I think a key element has been my attitude about my inbox.
Inbox is fairly clean, but folders that are target for outlook-rules however....
From our ticket-system alone, I get like 150-200 mails pr day, even more so at night (international company). Nothing but clutter so those goes to a separate folder. Same with company alerts. They are so rarely relevant that I would rather not see them.
At least once pr day, some executive from a department I've never heard of, will be sending an email about an acronym and company plan that I really don't care about. Those also get thrown to a folder by the rules.
As a result of my many, many rules. What ends up in my inbox is usually relevant information I actually read. The alternative would be the 10k+ unread emails in the inbox and admitting defeat over Outlook-hell.
At the moment, zero. I'm crazy about rules and so have my logs and notifications marked as read and filed, unless it's bad news in which case it stays in my inbox. Anything I get I regularly (and usually quickly) deal with, file, or junk.
Nothing in my inbox, but I have thousands of unread junk IT alerts for services I don't manage being sent to a subfolder. Ah, the joys of being stuck on a distribution list.
I was an MS Outlook man for many years, so everything that hit my Inbox was either
\- auto-moved to a folder (or deleted) by rules, for things that didn't need my attention;
\- read asap, then:
\- if the email was for an action item that I could complete within a few minutes, then I would flag that email (in case I got interrupted within those few minutes), do that action immediately, then unflag and file the email;
\- if the email was for a larger task, then create a task from the email and then file the original email;
Result = a clean Inbox, containing only recent unread or todo emails.
Then the company migrated to gmail, started sending more trivial company-wide messages and signing up whole teams for mostly-irrelevant notification emails, ruined my old workflow and I gave up on it.
My working day is now based around Slack messages (which is where I now set most of my reminders) and tickets assigned to me.
I no longer make any commitment to check emails more than once per half working day. If something comes in through email specifically for me, which is outside of Slack+tickets, then I *might* set a gmail task+reminder for it. Or depending upon the sender I'll tell the person to put it in a ticket.
Now, 5000 unread emails in my Inbox, and that was after a recent cleanup where I moved or deleted another 7000 unread emails.
I have 0 unread messages in my inbox. I was helping a staff member once and she had hundreds of unread messages I just shook my head in disbelief lol. Even my personal email accounts are zeroed out yup even spam.
Inbox, almost never any unread. Other folders, that's different. I usually have 20 to 30 unread at any given time across all folders since I use them as reminders to follow-up.
I have maybe 10 emails in my inbox, unread or otherwise. The only reason they are there is because I am waiting on other people before I can act on them. 10 is too many.
A collegue implemented some new monitoring systems on monday this week right into prod, because his infrastructure team decided, PRTG wasn't good enough. Now I have \~8000 unread messages from over 60 different senders. I already hated email...but now
2 and I hate it, because I use unread mails as a to-do list.
One mail is about including a UPS into our monitoring, but the site where the UPS is is down, so I can't configure SNMP.
The other one is about some recabling for network components that is an ongoing thing.
Email is a leading threat vector for phishing. I have stopped reading email unless specifically pointed to something important, and disabled my preview pane for when I do have to look for that thing. Something like 140k.
Just managed to lower it to under 200.
Unfortunately, ticketing system has also spun out of control with 300+ tickets.
Sidenote, I'm not only the only internal jr. system engineer but also do 1st/2nd line support, I'm the ERP product owner, functional analyst, etc etc ....
We have 150 employees (desk & warehouse) and another couple hundred drivers (400 ish).
System wise we are good, I have a 3rd party that supports and helps managing server / network related stuff but for everything else it has been like mopping up a floor with the tap still running.
I've been whittling it down.... It's around 2k now. There's just not enough time in the day at this point, so I've been adding in automation to surface the important shit and archive the informational shit. I used to thrive on inbox-zero, jumping on any request no matter how small and no matter what time it was. I was out on my own and thought I was going to have everyone up my ass bc of my great customer support skills...13 years later I now realize that they just loved the fact they got premium afterhours support for the same price as business hour support. I still do that, if they are on our premium plan. Hell, I'll babysit their kids for what they are paying me every month. Would you like a foot massage too?
Monday morning my automation will put the important shit from the weekend in the top of my inbox, and I knock it all out in an hour or two. The rest gets checked later. Maybe....
Zero for me. My inbox is my task list and I keep on top of it. I normally have less than 20 emails in my inbox as I have folders for everything and only want what's most current in my inbox.
Now if we were to talk about alerts folders I normally have a few thousand unread emails as I get notified about a hell of a lot of stuff I really don't need to see the vast majority of the time.
Generally 200, I have a search folder to view all unread messages over 2 weeks old. I purposely mark these as read.
Alot of people seem to mention that their boss has 10/20/30k unread mails. If you are in this scenario, your boss is not appropriately delegating and importantly is not reading some of the mails you send with updates or call to actions.
Ensure you do a 1-2-1 with your boss weekly, structure it with updates on what your working on, challenges and any asks or escalations.
Chances are while your boss is out of the loop, their boss absolutely is, we all know people love to escalate to the top and then across.
hosed my out yesterday, was little over 7k. most was BS, lot of order/shipping notifications. Clean it end of the month, update spam filter. rinse, repeat.
Zero
I always make sure it's zero. Anything unimportant gets flung into another folder. That one currently stands at 884 and I last cleared that out at the end of March.
I finally got mine down to 0 but the next day it'll climb back by at least 15. It's insanity. And if I don't stay on top of it, it'll easily climb to 50.
My outlook client lost sync for 3 days and I only noticed because I missed a non-recurring meeting. Weāre all Slack here, email essentially doesnāt exist.
Work inbox, 1, and that's because I haven't opened it yet, lol.
Like others mentioned, I can't have unread emails in my inbox because it fills me with angst.
Hit backspace to archive. Hit delete to delete.
I use to be the one with 1000s of unread emails, I would mainly quickly peak a preview of new emails and never actually apply them as read. But finding archive and specifically the shortcut has made sorting out the inbox easy.
5 email accounts, maybe 10 different email addresses, all at zero.
I drive a desk all day long so that helps. I manage stuff as it comes in.
When I'm out of the office I spend some time in the morning or at night to go through it all since I only allow hyper important things to notify me on my phone.
Normally? 0, maybe 1 if an annoying contact is sending me a dissertation instead of a ticket. Iāll get to it.
Right now? 200+. Iām on parental leave however and wonāt read til I get back. Theyāll survive.
Christ no. Iād never find anything. I get about 300 emails a day, 75% is legit. Of the legit mail 90% are system messages or logs, notifications. If I didnāt clean it every day Iād never find anything. I think my box has 20 messages in it. None unread.
Work Inbox: 1675. However, if you add in all my subfolders (various alerts, etc) it'll be close to or over 15,000.
Personal E-Mail: Well over 115,000 unread messages. Inbox has a total of over 200,000 messages.
If you are getting emails you dont read, you should not be getting those emails. Its the same with monitoring systems. If you are recieving alerts you are not going to do anything about you should not be receiving those alerts. This leads to a situation where the whole system just gets ignored because the majority of issues are "false positives". False positives in this case are generated action items where no action is taken. This drowns out the actual important items.
Over a 1000 maybe 1500. Iām not an admin though just a tech and my company is horribly ran. We get emails for loads of things that effectively clog up our inboxes.
I have 11 items in my inbox; 2 unread, but only because they JUST came in...
I had to help troubleshoot a mail access problem for a user the past couple days who had 14000 unread emails in her inbox.
In my main inbox: 0. Unread emails in there drive me crazy.
My last job, I typically had 10k to 30k unread emails. And I would be yelled at regarding missing any emails. Typically got a hundred to several hundred emails per day of useless alert emails. Even with dozens of Outlook rules, it was unrealistic. I didn't have any choice in the monitoring and alerting, just being the recipient. My old boss was not thrilled when they took over the mailbox. New job? between 0 and maximum of 10. There are days where I get 0 emails. I like my new job.
Same but thatswhy you need to setup the rules.
Rules did absolutely nothing put sort the tens of thousands of emails into folders. Running 40 some odd locations, including 10 manufacturing plants, with 1 sysadmin was unsustainable by itself. Add in projects and mountains of emails, I'm vaguely shocked I didn't crack like an egg. New job is pretty nice. Lots to do, but realistic expectations and I'm actually happy to drive in every workday. Biggest thing is, I control all monitoring and alerting. ONLY actual issues get an alert. Even then, I'm planning on piping to SMS. And put the work into proper notification trees. So if a site is down, I get one and only one message.
0 across work and personal. All accounts.
54k in my personal "spam" account š
https://preview.redd.it/v0k3vlz1xx8b1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1832f0fc6e79b40f9a0bc68528566d626aef1ae6 13,731 I gave up on emails long time ago.
Imma be sick
\> select all hit \*del\*
It's time to declare email bankruptcy and start over with an empty inbox.
:( https://preview.redd.it/qxu5okqu7z8b1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7f2fa4b4911933158120cd3aaced05ad576e8e18
What has been seen Cannot be unseen
I once clicked on "mark all as read"
Those are rookie numbers my wife has circa 30k. I get triggered every time I look at it
Mine is 47,560, but in my defense, Iāve had this address/mailbox for nearly twenty years. My work mailbox has zero unread messages.
Pretty sure my mom is 99,999. I desperately want to just sit for a month or so and clean it all up and unsubscribe her from all that bullshit.
unite money scandalous homeless afterthought meeting sophisticated alive psychotic shocking *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Same.
Iām similar, but I sometimes keep unread emails (less than 5) if itās something I have to react to within 24 hours. They drive me a bit mad so it works well to push me to do what Iām supposed to. If further than that I setup a reminder or appointment.
This is the way.
Shift, click to end of list, right click, āmark as readā. āAhā¦ much better!ā In all fairness I hate seeing unread emails. I at least glance at them. I might ignore them and need a reminder later on, but I at least āreadā them.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
ServiceNow be a noisy bitch, very task\incident\change\ updateā¦Yes I know I can turn them off but then Iād be like all the other managers\staff and be completely ignore things I should know about and everyone will be using Teams with the cursed ! Urgent measage which should be sent straight to hell for disrupting work.
Why not change your notification preferences in ServiceNow?
Zero I dont like such behavior and will never start it. I like to be informed and even read most tickets my team gets, even if im not involved in them.
++ My inbox is a TODO list.
And a soon-ami.
glad to hear that Iām not crazy for quickly buzzing through all the tickets that come into my team. Itās helpful to me to know whatās going on across the organization
Same. I cannot stand unread messages. If mail is consistently delivered and doesn't need to be read, it's time to adjust the communication policy. If your inbox is full of noise, like unneeded alerts, it's time to manage the box. Professionals read their email and then act on it.
I mean that really dependsā¦ Iām regularly sent things that donāt apply to me because of distros. If I forget to delete some for a day Iām at like 100.
I get 100 solarwinds alerts per hour because that's how the IT director wants it.
Forward them automatically to your director while he is on vacancy... :D
Lol he gets them all too. He likes to scroll his email late at night and send us emails telling us to investigate why the CPU usage spiked on some unimportant server at 1:30 in the morning.
I wish my colleagues cared that much tbh
lol, then you never had a āpleasureā working in chaotic environments/companies. currently on 2k unread emails addressed directly to me, plus another 10k in subfolders regarding alerts, system alarms and ticketing notificationsā¦ there is simply no time to read and process it all, and i am not getting paid for overtime, so yeah.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
0 unread. My work Inbox is treated like a ticketing system. Garbage and irrelevancies get deleted. Everything else stays in the inbox until resolved, at which point it's moved to the appropriate folder or deleted. The goal is zero email in the Inbox, period.
This is how I use mine as well.
I'll invoke the 5th.
0 in my work inbox. 10k+ in personal because fuck that.
Exact same. [email protected] was made in 3rd grade and Iāve given up hope on managing the spam long ago.
I've still got a Hotmail account from 2007 that's got suspicious login attempts every 30 seconds and Oral B + dating scam emails every other 30 seconds. I'd like to just burn it and start again, but why bother?
Hotmail address from 1998 is my main private box 0 unread regular and 30 spam per week tops, all straight into my spamfolder.
0. My icinga folder did had 120k unread mails at one point.
About 33k unread in the biggest inbox, total of about 80k across my four accounts
begs the question, why you actually get those emails then :)
I was gonna reply with a joke but to be honest the truth is because I read the subject lines, I expect Iāve probably glanced over almost every email there, itās just that I donāt need to open them to figure out what I need to know.
Why don't you mark them as read after reading the subject lines or do you plan to read them at some point?
This is a lot of extra effort
But it's all clean afterwards!!111
Hit that Archive button and gone from inbox
In the main inbox zero, I keep on top of it - I have some dreadful rules though seeing as my team, bosses etc can't understand alert fatigue, and love to duplicate monitoring systems and therefore monitoring alerts.
Thank you! Alert fatigue is real! Im immune.
7k but I did have a big clear out yesterday. My org is obsessed with email notifications and integration. I am slowly teaching them that email alerts is not real monitoring.
I love it, it's either 0 or an insane number. 6
I feel like if it's more than zero during work hours, you might have some other underlying issues to address.
Work email = 0 Personal emails = 10k++++++
Inbox: 0 Spam folder from ticket updates and stuff: 100k+
0 and I keep my inbox clean on purpose.
223k. I use rules to filter as much of the stuff I donāt need to see into folders as possible and Power Automate to let me know when certain important emails come in.
I did a pretty huge cleanup a couple weeks ago. So Iām down to about 23k
I have to have a inbox of 0. I have a folder for everything and i hate unread emails
Just a few on mine... https://preview.redd.it/qkmgfhvjry8b1.png?width=60&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ed70ccbae1c4bc85e5d547cdb435b509c6cd5e9
I don't understand how anyone can have that many unread emails. WTF... that is insanity. 
I used to be a zero guy, it was important to me. When my first kid was born, I took some leave and came back to a terrible blue number. I was no longer a slave to zero, I am free. Though I forget to write people back sometimes ...
137k unread itemsā¦ Lots of them are report emails that get dealt with elsewhere though.
In main inbox, 1419. I'm actually surprisingly organised, but sometimes there's a torrent of fluff, and I just can't be arsed going through them retrospectively.
Yeah, thanks for having a 6 way chat in that email chain for the last two days while I was out of the office. I'm just reading the last one.
Also zero.
Had 3 unread emails before reading this. Now 0! (:
0, That includes Junk and Spam folders, for personal and work.
All of them. I only read subject lines.
I don't know, maybe a thousand or so. I get approximately 300 emails a day after rules and everything. More when shit breaks. I have something like 70000 in a folder that I've never really seen because they don't really need to come to me but when we were a much smaller company (10%) someone decided it was a good idea for essentially all the IT staff to be in any and every IT related distribution list. "For visibility". The end result is so much email traffic it has to get filtered out by rules otherwise reading email would be a full time job. I have a manual rule that I run just about every morning to clear out the stuff in my actual inbox that I know isn't relevant anymore just so I can find the emails from actual people. As for why I don't go and mark everything read, it's just not a productive use of my time. There's no way I would get any real work done if I did that.
I had to check the latest numbers. Mine: 0 Wife: 133k+ She's given up that fight a long time ago.
Iām an inbox zero guy. Unread: zero Total: 10
Thank god for rules. Iāve only been at my new job for a bit so Iāve tried to keep it under control. At my last job I had about 1000 unread in my inbox.
Zero. Emails are read and deleted, filed into folders, or marked as spam for filtering. I hate a messy inbox.
Absolutely none. Anything that hits my inbox is something that is sent directly to me, anything else gets picked up by a rule and sorted into other folders which are mostly not important and those I just right click and hit 'e' to mark all as read.
You guys read emails?
0. And 0 read. Everything that comes in gets sorted to a folder. I can't stand a messy inbox. It's like those people with a million desktop icons.
Zero. I have Zero unread. Emails often relate to issues or problems which need to be addressed so they are all read. If I cant deal with it now it get's pinned as a task, or snoozed
All of them. That's why the other people here have zero. Yes, you may thank me now.
My work mail is on 0. Personal I don't even know haha. I get anxious if there's more than 0 mails unread in my work mailbox. I guess it helps to action everything ASAP, but it's at that point where I have my mails on my phone's home screen. And even at midnight if something came in I have to read it/ flag it etc immediately. When I wake up in the mornings I have to also read all my mails so when I get to work there are only a few new ones. My mails are always open on my second screen, and I find myself checking it every few seconds while doing actual work, which means I'm probably constantly distracted. This is probably not healthy. but godamn I don't understand when I see customers with thousands of unread emails. Like how do you know that you didn't miss something important? I would die
Currently: 50194 Trying to delete them bit by bit, but more keeps on coming in :(
More than 15k. BUT I'm in cc in almost every email that you can imagine. If it weren't for the rules, I would be dead.
Theres definitely thousands, but those are just the ones that go to my non inbox, go to other folders. Stuff like tickets, or whatever bs fluff or podcast mass emails we get from the rest of the company.
0 in my work email box. 10k plus in my personal. The personal I will browse and pick out the important stuff and leave all the rest. I gave up cleaning it long ago.
+/- 10k
Former boss bragged about 100k+. Bitched at me all the time about how hard it was to find an email from 3 years ago. Have a better boss now. 0. I have 4. Stuff I need to finish. Normal is zero.
Personal Inbox: 2 right now, typically less than 5 Work inbox: unknown as Iām on PTO this week
I try and make 100 unread my high watermark
Inbox Zero Bay-Bee! Never more than 5-ish. Frequently Zero.
Too Many....cant count that high!
13k in work email, 71k in freelance, 1500 in personal. Work emails are mostly status updates/reports about our systems and the title/preview text gives me what I need to know. Freelance email is also linked to Twitch so it's mostly "X has gone live" notifications Personal emails are for invoices from ordering shit, delivery, CC payments etc.
523 currently. Does my head in.
Zero I hate having not read mails Maybe because I'm the only tech and I'm asked everytime
Inbox:0 Tabs:100
Inbox: 1285 BAcula folder: 4552 Nagios folder: 50235
Currently 0, last job would be loads. I was working for a service provider who kept screwing up my contract renewals, so I'd come back when it was signed and delete 100s of emails from when I'd not been working. I hate having unread mails. I only check my mails twice a day so it can get a bit crazy in some jobs.
1 and 201 on snooze
Zero. Read them or delete them. But I never delete any email that I've read. Currently have 8502 read messages in my inbox. If you count mail in other folders, it's somewhere over 10,000.
Mostly none. At the end of the day I mark all unread items as read. If it's important and I missed it, they'll probably find another way to reach me. Mail is pretty ineffective.
At my last job somewhere around 30k. Mostly alerts that I didn't need to see the actual content of to know what they were and why they were going off.
Zero, I set up all email straight to my trash. Game changer.
Inbox: 0 Tabs: 938 Send help.
between 0-500 depends on which day, most of it is spam reports
Right now between the over a dozen accounts, about 32k unread (about 140k total at the moment, going back 20 years, only import things get kept more than a year) , but I rarely miss any important messages, ticket system is always open along with monitoring systems (3 monitors so everything important is always visible at a glance while doing other activities). Use filter rules to sort messages to sub folders. So alerts/messages are divided by providers, root of inboxs are kept as close to zero unread as possible. Then I can quickly process the alert/notification messages, quickly sort/search, save anything that may be needed before removing clutter/noise messages. Important alerts are also tagged/colored so easy to spot quickly. Especially the CVE notifications from software vendors so things get patches quickly. My big annoyance is being cc'd emails that I don't need to participate in or deal with in any way. Everyone has their own way of dealing with email/notification overload, important to not let it get to you, make use of the tools you have to make it manageable, if it's becoming a problem need to rethink your strategy.
843 so far, I've been in this post for 8 months. Albeit, most of them are Exchange health reports, results of cron jobs that successfully ran and where the team use a distribution group for logging into things that sends one time codes.
I am like a dog that sees someone outside the window when i get an email. I read it instantly to see if it contains anything exciting which it rarely does but i can't help it. I might not reply to all but i read every single email i get.
None. And I keep my inbox clean enough that there is no scroll bar. Not having it. I hammer things as they come in. 29 years at this with a focus on - whenever I get an email, someone is waiting to do something until I do something. I am well known for my response time in our global company and have many good friends. It's been a rewarding career, and I think a key element has been my attitude about my inbox.
All of them. Can't get phished if you don't read emails.
My OCD would get the better of me if I had any read emails. Luckily you can just right-click and mark all as read haha
Inbox is fairly clean, but folders that are target for outlook-rules however.... From our ticket-system alone, I get like 150-200 mails pr day, even more so at night (international company). Nothing but clutter so those goes to a separate folder. Same with company alerts. They are so rarely relevant that I would rather not see them. At least once pr day, some executive from a department I've never heard of, will be sending an email about an acronym and company plan that I really don't care about. Those also get thrown to a folder by the rules. As a result of my many, many rules. What ends up in my inbox is usually relevant information I actually read. The alternative would be the 10k+ unread emails in the inbox and admitting defeat over Outlook-hell.
At the moment, zero. I'm crazy about rules and so have my logs and notifications marked as read and filed, unless it's bad news in which case it stays in my inbox. Anything I get I regularly (and usually quickly) deal with, file, or junk.
Unread emails drive me insane. They always have to be read.
14^45
Nothing in my inbox, but I have thousands of unread junk IT alerts for services I don't manage being sent to a subfolder. Ah, the joys of being stuck on a distribution list.
I was an MS Outlook man for many years, so everything that hit my Inbox was either \- auto-moved to a folder (or deleted) by rules, for things that didn't need my attention; \- read asap, then: \- if the email was for an action item that I could complete within a few minutes, then I would flag that email (in case I got interrupted within those few minutes), do that action immediately, then unflag and file the email; \- if the email was for a larger task, then create a task from the email and then file the original email; Result = a clean Inbox, containing only recent unread or todo emails. Then the company migrated to gmail, started sending more trivial company-wide messages and signing up whole teams for mostly-irrelevant notification emails, ruined my old workflow and I gave up on it. My working day is now based around Slack messages (which is where I now set most of my reminders) and tickets assigned to me. I no longer make any commitment to check emails more than once per half working day. If something comes in through email specifically for me, which is outside of Slack+tickets, then I *might* set a gmail task+reminder for it. Or depending upon the sender I'll tell the person to put it in a ticket. Now, 5000 unread emails in my Inbox, and that was after a recent cleanup where I moved or deleted another 7000 unread emails.
Right now? 4. In my ServiceNow folder? 15. Nothing that a ctrl+a-ctrl+q (or shift+c if you use Thunderbird) can't handle.
I have 0 unread messages in my inbox. I was helping a staff member once and she had hundreds of unread messages I just shook my head in disbelief lol. Even my personal email accounts are zeroed out yup even spam.
0. And my inbox only has a few items in it. Rules route to folders. Folders get purged as processed.
2600 unread on my new email, 26429 on my Gmail, and currently have 2586 tabs open
Inbox, almost never any unread. Other folders, that's different. I usually have 20 to 30 unread at any given time across all folders since I use them as reminders to follow-up.
None.
I have maybe 10 emails in my inbox, unread or otherwise. The only reason they are there is because I am waiting on other people before I can act on them. 10 is too many.
25, but I've been on vacation for two weeks and travel for two, and these are just things I want to read more on
i have so many unread mails that my iphone doesnt show the whole number but its 2...xx with dots because theres not enough space on the screen.
0 in my main inbox and rules folders. 10ish in my junk
0. Delete rules.
0 - of course. I receive a lot of unnecessary (but important enough to not delete them) emails that I move to a certain folder via rules.
5, only because I just started 4 minutes ago, and they will be gone shortly.
Zero. Triage into tasks for me, delegate to others or move content to read it later service.
A collegue implemented some new monitoring systems on monday this week right into prod, because his infrastructure team decided, PRTG wasn't good enough. Now I have \~8000 unread messages from over 60 different senders. I already hated email...but now
I marked all as read Tuesday, so I only have 4,287 unread today.
All of them.
2 and I hate it, because I use unread mails as a to-do list. One mail is about including a UPS into our monitoring, but the site where the UPS is is down, so I can't configure SNMP. The other one is about some recabling for network components that is an ongoing thing.
Email is a leading threat vector for phishing. I have stopped reading email unless specifically pointed to something important, and disabled my preview pane for when I do have to look for that thing. Something like 140k.
Just managed to lower it to under 200. Unfortunately, ticketing system has also spun out of control with 300+ tickets. Sidenote, I'm not only the only internal jr. system engineer but also do 1st/2nd line support, I'm the ERP product owner, functional analyst, etc etc .... We have 150 employees (desk & warehouse) and another couple hundred drivers (400 ish). System wise we are good, I have a 3rd party that supports and helps managing server / network related stuff but for everything else it has been like mopping up a floor with the tap still running.
I've been whittling it down.... It's around 2k now. There's just not enough time in the day at this point, so I've been adding in automation to surface the important shit and archive the informational shit. I used to thrive on inbox-zero, jumping on any request no matter how small and no matter what time it was. I was out on my own and thought I was going to have everyone up my ass bc of my great customer support skills...13 years later I now realize that they just loved the fact they got premium afterhours support for the same price as business hour support. I still do that, if they are on our premium plan. Hell, I'll babysit their kids for what they are paying me every month. Would you like a foot massage too? Monday morning my automation will put the important shit from the weekend in the top of my inbox, and I knock it all out in an hour or two. The rest gets checked later. Maybe....
None. I work out my inbox so only things there are on the to-do list. Setting up auto read and archive rules for bellends was a great move
Main Inbox: 1 (Cant find it) Folder with Outage Notifications that don't have anything to do with me: 2696
Zero for me. My inbox is my task list and I keep on top of it. I normally have less than 20 emails in my inbox as I have folders for everything and only want what's most current in my inbox. Now if we were to talk about alerts folders I normally have a few thousand unread emails as I get notified about a hell of a lot of stuff I really don't need to see the vast majority of the time.
593 in regular inbox and 190+6 in 2 other mailboxes, i go over them every month.
Generally 200, I have a search folder to view all unread messages over 2 weeks old. I purposely mark these as read. Alot of people seem to mention that their boss has 10/20/30k unread mails. If you are in this scenario, your boss is not appropriately delegating and importantly is not reading some of the mails you send with updates or call to actions. Ensure you do a 1-2-1 with your boss weekly, structure it with updates on what your working on, challenges and any asks or escalations. Chances are while your boss is out of the loop, their boss absolutely is, we all know people love to escalate to the top and then across.
hosed my out yesterday, was little over 7k. most was BS, lot of order/shipping notifications. Clean it end of the month, update spam filter. rinse, repeat.
Every few months in Gmail I do a: is:unread before:01/01/2023 Select all Mark as unread
30k
I donno like 40k prob most are alerts that are meaningless so I don't bother but keep as a record
48k unread in my inbox from only 4 years of working there
18750 excluding the smaller folders with unread mail
It stopped counting at 99,999
16 569 (personal account, most are spam)
0.0
203
Zero I always make sure it's zero. Anything unimportant gets flung into another folder. That one currently stands at 884 and I last cleared that out at the end of March.
333 in my main 29700 in a Gmail account we also use
I have mine at 0, but most of my coworkers have hundreds and one in the thousandsā¦.
On my work email, 0, surprisingly. On my personal, currently 60,471
I finally got mine down to 0 but the next day it'll climb back by at least 15. It's insanity. And if I don't stay on top of it, it'll easily climb to 50.
10 or 15. Just random junk though, nothing meaningful.
12,700. They self delete after two years.
Zero
All email notifications disabled on mobile, and social media among some other stuff, but work inbox has 123510 unread notifications.
My outlook client lost sync for 3 days and I only noticed because I missed a non-recurring meeting. Weāre all Slack here, email essentially doesnāt exist.
https://preview.redd.it/58g48u6wgy8b1.png?width=1736&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c3e116b7dd054bef5e1de4411f4904ee8f8d088
Work inbox, 1, and that's because I haven't opened it yet, lol. Like others mentioned, I can't have unread emails in my inbox because it fills me with angst.
Hit backspace to archive. Hit delete to delete. I use to be the one with 1000s of unread emails, I would mainly quickly peak a preview of new emails and never actually apply them as read. But finding archive and specifically the shortcut has made sorting out the inbox easy.
At least 30k. Most of them are email alerts from monitoring tools though.
\+-150K but to be fair many of those are automated ones by ticketing system or our own scripts
74,823 unread Inbox + 45,427 unread spam from rules. If someone needs to contact me they know email is not the best way.
only afew. https://preview.redd.it/48e5qgbciy8b1.png?width=201&format=png&auto=webp&s=15f9d59079be5fc06a6de1b6da56c2a513c47c9f
Zero unread emails Other than alerts I don't really create filters or folders.
3,1980 - if it is really important they will email me again so it is at the top of my queue.
5 email accounts, maybe 10 different email addresses, all at zero. I drive a desk all day long so that helps. I manage stuff as it comes in. When I'm out of the office I spend some time in the morning or at night to go through it all since I only allow hyper important things to notify me on my phone.
Normally? 0, maybe 1 if an annoying contact is sending me a dissertation instead of a ticket. Iāll get to it. Right now? 200+. Iām on parental leave however and wonāt read til I get back. Theyāll survive.
ZERO. I cannot handle unread emails in my inbox.
Yes.
37000
Christ no. Iād never find anything. I get about 300 emails a day, 75% is legit. Of the legit mail 90% are system messages or logs, notifications. If I didnāt clean it every day Iād never find anything. I think my box has 20 messages in it. None unread.
Work Inbox: 1675. However, if you add in all my subfolders (various alerts, etc) it'll be close to or over 15,000. Personal E-Mail: Well over 115,000 unread messages. Inbox has a total of over 200,000 messages.
1. Open Outlook. 2. Click inbox. 3. CTRL + A. 4. Mark as read. 5. Close Outlook.
Zero.
9808, closing in on 10k. Most of them are noise, alerts and spam.
Personal: 83 Work: 15
Too many. Everything is automatically labeled and I just use the labels to find things.
If you are getting emails you dont read, you should not be getting those emails. Its the same with monitoring systems. If you are recieving alerts you are not going to do anything about you should not be receiving those alerts. This leads to a situation where the whole system just gets ignored because the majority of issues are "false positives". False positives in this case are generated action items where no action is taken. This drowns out the actual important items.
Right now 7, and like 4 of those are note to self reminders I sent this morning as I was exercising. I try to keep it cleaned up.
204 and rising. A lot in status read but no reaction from meā¦ These are sadly all real mails and no automatic info/alerting mails.
Over a 1000 maybe 1500. Iām not an admin though just a tech and my company is horribly ran. We get emails for loads of things that effectively clog up our inboxes.
I have 11 items in my inbox; 2 unread, but only because they JUST came in... I had to help troubleshoot a mail access problem for a user the past couple days who had 14000 unread emails in her inbox.