5 ms·
what's wrong with leaving emails unread?
by samirm 8y ago
what's wrong with leaving emails unread?
- jfaat 8y agoFor me, it’s because I can’t stand having meaningless ‘5,423’ badges littering the icons on my home screen.
- majewsky 8y agoWe've been conditioned to have that reaction. (That's also why they're red.) Unread-badges are designed to make you open the app, thus increasing the amount of time spent in the app. Freudian slip: I accidentally wrote "the time spent in the ad" on the first try. :)
- kkarakk 8y agoyeah but every service you sign up for now has newsletters/mailing lists and constantly sends you semi relevant spam with the occasional gem that you can't instantly consign to the rubbish bin. inbox was so simple for dealing with things like that
- krageon 8y agoYou don't really miss anything by throwing every newsletter straight in the spam folder, the worst that will happen is that you hear life-changing news a day late. It will not kill you.
- ZeikJT 8y agoNoooooo, please just unsubscribe. I only sign up for newsletters I actually want to have delivered to my email but every once in a blue moon I notice that a newsletter went to spam instead of my inbox and invariably the reason given is "It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." which to me means that other people marked it as spam instead of properly just unsubscribing. I understand that it used to be very difficult or impossible to unsubscribe from stuff, but nowaways it's easier than ever as emails are basically required to have a one or two click unsubscribe system.
- krageon 8y agoI get plenty of "newsletters" I never signed up for. Those deserve to be marked as spam. I can't trust that the unsubscribe link isn't used to harvest email addresses that are still in active use, so clicking one of those links is a net negative for me.
- Thlom 8y agoHm, but if you marked them as "done" in inbox they should have been archived in gmail and not show as "unread" on the app icon as that only shows unread in inbox? That's they way it works for me at least. I use inbox and gmail both as apps on my iPhone and in the browser. I've been archiving and marked e-mails as "done" without reading them for years and never had this problem.
- samirm 8y agoIt's just as "meaningless" as having any other number badge on your home screen...
- kaushalmodi 8y agoI don't like incorrect unread counts lying around. I then cannot distinguish between truly unread emails and the emails that I swiped as Done in Inbox, but still left unread in Gmail.
- Ajedi32 8y agoThe unread count is correct; you didn't really _read_ those emails. The problem is that the UI is placing undue emphasis on the number of emails you didn't read; that's a pretty irrelevant statistic. Half of the emails I receive don't need to be read; just glancing at the subject is enough. Inbox got it right by not showing unread counts and just letting you mark emails as done when they're no longer needed.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoUnder your definition, the unread count is too low. Gmail counts something as read after you load its contents, not after you read it.