'You have HOW MANY unread emails?' PC Gamer shares their inbox shame

Between midnight and 8:00 am this morning I received 56 emails. By the end of today that number will be well over a hundred, by the end of October I'll have about 4,000 more, and my total for 2026 will be in the neighborhood of 50,000 (work and personal combined.)

Fifty. Thousand. Emails. In a year! That's with (and I just counted) the 284 email filters I've set up to keep out at least some of the garbage, nearly 200 blocked addresses, and our publisher's own hypervigilant email security system in place—which diverted 27 emails to spam today alone. That makes it incredibly difficult to stay on top of the actual useful emails we want to see when we open our inboxes.

Email has become a waking nightmare, so that ugly red number on your phone or desktop showing you how many unread emails you have? …