[yesfitz]

I'm an unrepentent "neither".

Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!

Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.

Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.

[jcul]

Yup, another inbox only user here. Unread means it's a to-do.

In Gmail you can set it to group all unread at the top.

Sometimes I'll open an email and mark unread again if I need to come back to it.

[dinkleberg]

I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.

[rezonant]

I was inbox-only since GMail was in beta, and received tons of email notifications and extraneous mail over that 20 year period that didn't get read.

My inbox was at about 100k _unread_ emails with about 280k total.

I am happy to say I am now at inbox-zero (ish).

[hdjrudni]

Impressive. I've also been using gmail since beta. I'm only at 27,980 unread.

[BeetleB]

> If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.

What if you read an email, and need to do something, but can't do it right now? Do you mark it as unread so you can deal with it later?

I did that for years. Thankfully no longer!

[yesfitz]

Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.

It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.

[rezonant]

And then while checking your email you mindlessly click it and realize its the one you have "snoozed" by marking it unread, so you need to mark it unread again.

Rinse, repeat

[BeetleB]

Yes - that was Hell.

Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.

There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.