[periferral]

There are a few shortcomings here

Having filters: Most users may use Inbox as the fall through location for emails. But a lot use filters as a way to move stuff out of the inbox to specific folders as a means to prioritize responses.

eg. My wife, business partner etc, might make it to folder important, my 2nd level priority emails go someplace else, mailing lists elsewhere and so on.

Inbox is whats left and is least priority. How do you account for whats important. What if I don't use priority inbox? What happens when I don't read the email in my inbox at all since it isn't critical to my day to day function.

This also doesn't account for a mail client use or mail forwarding from Google. Since Gmail provides a way to use a mail client or forward mail options, it means that I might read mail on my client but not report back to gmail or just read all the mail from another account.

Anyway, some thoughts to ponder over. May not be a mainstream problem since most users might not be doing what I suggested.