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Poll: How many emails do you have in your inbox right now?
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.
- heeton 12y agohttp://cl.ly/image/32262A052N1I http://cl.ly/image/32262A052N1I
- phaer 12y ago"and include both read and unread messages"
- DrStalker 12y agoI 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 12y agoI 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 12y agoHe 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+
- dr_ick 12y agoAh, a fellow GTD'er :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
- kennu 12y agoI 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 12y agoI feel that 1-99 should be broken down into a more granular scaling. something like: 1-10, 10-40, 40-100
- robertfw 12y agoI 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 12y agoTotally 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.
- jluxenberg 12y agoI use this system and it has transformed my business and personal life: http://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html http://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html
- Swizec 12y agoThis 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 12y agoIn 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 12y agoOh wow, 55k+
- paraserv 12y agoOver 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 12y agoAll messages includes archived messages. That's not what the poll asks for.
- byoung2 12y agoAll 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 12y agoMy inbox only tells me how many are unread. Whats the point of moving read emails to another folder?
- hayksaakian 12y agoVisual de-clutter to improve focus and remove distractions I suppose. I don't do that, but its what I hear.
- cpncrunch 12y agoSo how do you know which ones still need to be dealt with?
- nilkn 12y agoIf 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.
- phillijw 12y agoI just mark mine as Unread if I need to read them again.
- Groxx 12y agoMark 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 12y agoNo idea how many are in folders - I wouldn't consider the folders to be part of the inbox.
- daurnimator 12y ago344 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 12y agoI 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cpncrunch 12y agoSo how do you find the emails that you've read but not dealt with yet?
- plorkyeran 12y agoI just mark them as unread. I don't find it useful to distinguish between "read but not dealt with yet" and "unread".
- cpncrunch 12y agoSo 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 12y agoYes, 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 12y agoIn 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/ 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/ 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 12y agoMy inbox has everything in it. From .. ever.
- byoung2 12y agoI'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 12y agoMy 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cjbarber 12y agoZero, 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dsuth 12y ago950+, and I also subscribe to the zero inbox philosophy :S Time to get organised (again).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- schrodinger 12y agoI 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 12y ago$ 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 https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080 [1] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz
- maxerickson 12y agoHave you noticed Not much? http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/ http://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/ I haven't used it because because, but the good, fast search would be important if I got sick of the gmail web client.
- sigil 12y agoTried notmuch-mutt, didn't work well. That was a while ago though. Anyone have good experiences with it recently?
- Apreche 12y agoTotal - 11,672 Unread - 0
- igaape 12y ago13,988 Account 1 3078 Account 2 7855 Account 3 831 Account 4
- sidcool 12y agoMicrosoft 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.
- daltonlp 12y agoALL OF THEM.
- xwowsersx 12y agoA 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 12y agoWorking 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.