[matkam]

I too practice "inbox 0," and making sure I am very diligent about unsubscribing from mailing lists and creating the occasional filter. I am completely content with email, and I feel like this is more for people who never hit the "archive" button. This is why I use stock gmail over Dropbox's Mailbox. And I am afraid that if I start using Google's Inbox, my inbox will just get cluttered and I won't be able to go back.

[DINKDINK]

can you explain to me the advantage of archiving a message over just letting it rest in a read state in your inbox? I've never been able to see an added value to it.

[bendyorke]

I have two groups of emails: "professional" and "online" ones. I'll "inbox 0" my "professional" emails, archiving, deleting, and snoozing emails. For my "online" emails, I don't do any management, it's just a giant inbox of every email I've received.

The advantage I find to archiving messages is just a slight psychological boost. When the inbox is empty, I know I have nothing to do. If I have <20 emails (I always try to keep these inboxes under 20), I can see everything I have to do. As I work my way through the list, it's obvious visual feedback that I'm making progress. Just little things that I feel slightly improve my experience.

Although this only works because I have my other massive "online" inbox :D

[cpuguy83]

It's completely mental (not as in crazy, as in it's a mental issue). I like to keep things tidy, if something is in my inbox then it's something that needs to be dealt with.

[Lewisham]

Read state shouldn't be overloaded with "still to ToDo", otherwise you don't really know how many ToDo items you have vs those you haven't triaged yet.

[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.

[lmm]

It's just a third state. I use unread for "not started", read-but-in-inbox for "in progress" and archived for "done". If you don't need that distinction between not started and in progress then sure, just leave it all read in your inbox.

[prawn]

Same goes for "starring for to-do" vs "unread as to-do". The latter does mix in requires-action with yet-to-read, but maybe a lot of us class a yet-to-read email as requiring an action anyway?

[aiiane]

I'm curious why you think Inbox would result in your inbox getting cluttered. From how you describe your workflow, Inbox would work well for you.

[matkam]

Well you're right. I've been using Inbox for over a week, and I like it. No email clutter, and it matches my flow pretty well.