[grayclhn]

The value can be small (or nonexistent), but I like to know that everything in my inbox needs to be acted on/processed, rather than having to determine whether I've already done it or not. You can do this while leaving everything in the inbox by toggling the read/unread tags, but I'd rather not.

Similarly, I've never seen the advantage of leaving old emails in my inbox rather than just archiving everything without labeling it.

[DINKDINK]

ah, my approach has been anything in my inbox that is unread is either requiring of action on it, or unread.

[organsnyder]

The problem I have when I've used that strategy is that then I need to skim all of the emails and recall the state of each one. I find it to be both distracting and stressful—I'm reminded of every task I need to accomplish (or, at least, the most recent 20) whenever I check my email.

For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.