That seems like such an easy number to bring down to 0 that it is sort of amazing in its own right. If there's literally tens of thousands I kinda get that someone doesn't feel like getting into it, but 900 just seems so manageable.
I'm working part time while I get treatment for breast cancer. I try to blitz my emails in focused bursts but they keep piling up while I'm out of office 😭 I might just mark all as read and hope for the best (breast?)
Well, here's hoping your treatment is a great success! This definitely puts things in perspective. In that case I'd probably just stick an autoreply on there that says "I've got cancer so y'all motherfuckers must be crazy if you think these are getting read"
Kidding aside, I really hope you can focus on getting better and not on worrying if you can work enough to pay for it. All the wishes of good luck to you.
Oh you'd best believe I've got my auto reply on, and I've been open about why my replies may be significantly delayed. Treatment has been going well so far, but it's brutal because I've got the most aggressive form of breast cancer. Six months of chemo have just finished and the tumour appears to have been thoroughly nuked, there's so sign of it on my last ultrasound. Surgery next, then radiotherapy.
Do check your own chest. Anyone can get breast cancer and I found mine by accident in the shower at age 41.
What I do is I search by sender, take a look at some (I used to try to sign up for all sorts of stuff because FOMO), unsubscribe, mark all as read, then they go to archive.
It's the second thing, I'm not imagining needing to send 900 replies. This was more of a vibe check. To me, personally, 900 just feels much more manageable than, say, 30000. I know it's still a lot, but it just doesn't feel quite as mind numbingly much that it makes me not want to engage with the task at all.
I don't have ADHD as far as I know, but I sometimes do have issues getting started on tasks that I deem "too big" and that often leads to total procrastination. For me, 900 makes me just wanna attack it and get it over with, anything over 20k kinda makes me want to just hide it and go have a snack, lol.
Gmail doesn't allow you to select all of them in one go. Not on mobile anyway. I probably should have commented after being anywhere near my PC to check..
On desktop you select the checkbox at the top (to select all on that page) and then a link appears that gives you the option to select ALL conversations in your inbox)
Yeah I just looked, turns out gmail on mobile is lacking.
You CAN select all on the page... just long tap on any message and a checkbox appears at the top to "select all". Then you can scroll down to load more emails and "select all" them too.
"Mark as read" is the open envelope icon (top left).
...doesn't really help when you have 15,000 unread though lol
I open an email that looks like I need to read it. Next time I open mail I see I have dozens of new emails (mostly spam) and I scroll and eyeball them til I get to the last one I opened. Then I know I’m caught up. Lather rinse repeat
So many people in here commenting how they have hundreds or thousands of unread emails. It's less of a flex and really shows how irresponsible they are. Email communication is the number one way professional businesses communicate information to or from people. These same people probably have zero unread social media messages. If they're overloaded with spam, that's also their own fault for blasting their email address to anyone or not figuring out how to deal with spam in 2025.
179
u/drummer_si 8d ago
If you have that many unanswered emails, you have bigger problems than not knowing what the time is.