How bad are your unread work emails?

[RosieLeaLovesTea]

How bad are your unread work emails and how long have you worked there?
for reference I had 1700 unread emails this morning. After a couple of hours I have cut it down to 845. Still got a way to go. I have worked there 3 yrs.

Easily over 2000. I have 100+ unread emails that have come in from as of yesterday afternoon. I'll try to read the 200+ I will have by Monday. Most of it is students asking questions I've already answered.

0 unread. It would stress me out.

Likewise. Mine are all accounts department ones and are fairly time critical, so it is rare for me to leave anything unread for more than a couple of hours at most.

Just busy on work ones and having some unread doesn’t bother me. In the personal mailbox I just scan every few days to take out the few I need (like airline booking confirmations) and the rest stay there. Sometimes I might need something like a receipt to return some clothes so I don’t want to delete them and it’s a waste of my time to spend the time sorting and deleting them.
works for me.

35,000. I have been there 20 years, but unless I am replying to the email, I don't mark it as read.

Total emails is nearly 137,000.

If something needs actioning without replying to the email, I make a note in my manual notebook.

I am in my late 50s so started work before computers.

Why even keep an unread email? Why mot just delete it?

Honestly, my mind is blown.

I am inspired to do better. Going to set up more rules and delete a load. I did already ask my indirect reports to only cc me if they required my direct intervention but it's started to creep up again.

Having said that I have a packed calendar next week

I'm in a similar position. I get over a hundred emails a day and there is no way I can read them all in detail / some are system generated / a significant portion don't require action. Our servers are very slow so trying to sort by eg email title & deleting all but the final email takes so long / causes system freezes, it's not practical to do this.

Some of you work in really inefficient places if you get copied into emails you don’t need to read.

Same as a lot of people. I can be in meetings or with clients or offsite for 20-30 hours a week and I get up to 100 emails a day. It's impossible to keep up.

Every few months I move 500 or so into a folder I call "backlog".

I have never once had to look for an email in my "backlog" folder....

1. Cc emails go into a separate folder for me to read in bulk a couple of times a day. I read every email as it comes in then either action if it's quick or flag and add to my to do list. All emails filed into correct folder for project by end of Friday and main inbox down to 0 emails

Yep! And senior management are the absolute worst offenders.

I have up to 20 in my inbox marked as unread at any one time.

They actually are read but I then mark them unread - they're things I may need to wait to action or want visible to refer to quickly in future and don't want to risk forgetting about them in a folder.

I find the thought of not reading (scanning) or deleting every incoming email bizarre.

If you're copied into 100's of emails a day that require no input or action from you at all, tell people to stop ccing you in. Being top of an organisation is not a 'reason' to ignore your emails...how odd.

Because I might want to refer to it in future.

How many have you ever gone back abd retrieved out of your archive?

At least once a month whenever someone asks me a question about something that was mentioned in an email. I do a search and it might be one of the emails that I haven't marked as read.

I have on occasion. One time, I'd moved internally to another role in the same department and about 18 months later it transpired that something I'd been doing in my previous role hadn't been done since I left - I was able to pull the handover email I'd done clearly explaining that it needed to be done and giving instructions on how to do it.

I do all the time.

I've got some practical ideas from this thread about managing email but I wanted to ask about something that someone mentioned but now I can't find the post. This is, does anyone use an email management programme that is efficient to use?

We provide information to clients that we need to keep copies of and each client has a folder on a network drive, but it's really fiddly to save things and then find it again, and made even more so because a lot of the saving is done by support staff who are non specialists and if they can't find the right file first time they'll either make another one or just shove it in anywhere.
There's thousands of files so you can run a keyword search and go get a coffee, catch up with colleagues, go out for lunch but it will either bring back hundreds of files or nothing at all. So there must be a better way, can anyone say what this is?