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Comment by kaushalmodi | Hacker News Reader

These are really unfortunate news! :(

My stress level just went up after opening gmail.com after few years since I switched to Inbox.

Being used to just swiping emails that I didn't need to attend, I didn't realize they were still in "unread" status.

Now when I opened Gmail, I see:

    Social          190
    Updates       4,856
    Forums        3,329
    Promotions    4,214

The worst part is that I cannot see which of those "Unread" emails are pinned in Inbox.

And.. we cannot Pin emails in Gmail the same way as in Inbox :( [I have already read the "Pin emails" section in https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/9117840, but starring/labeling/searching doesn't give the convenience that Inbox pinning did.]

I'll also miss all the rich email rendering of emails like shipping tracking, flight tickets, appointments, etc.

Alas..

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Update: And of course Google would discontinue Inbox. Inbox did not have ads, but Gmail has freaking ads!

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If they'd kept it as a flagship, bet those ads would be in there.

what's wrong with leaving emails unread?

For me, it’s because I can’t stand having meaningless ‘5,423’ badges littering the icons on my home screen.

We've been conditioned to have that reaction. (That's also why they're red.) Unread-badges are designed to make you open the app, thus increasing the amount of time spent in the app.

Freudian slip: I accidentally wrote "the time spent in the ad" on the first try. :)

yeah but every service you sign up for now has newsletters/mailing lists and constantly sends you semi relevant spam with the occasional gem that you can't instantly consign to the rubbish bin. inbox was so simple for dealing with things like that

You don't really miss anything by throwing every newsletter straight in the spam folder, the worst that will happen is that you hear life-changing news a day late. It will not kill you.

Noooooo, please just unsubscribe. I only sign up for newsletters I actually want to have delivered to my email but every once in a blue moon I notice that a newsletter went to spam instead of my inbox and invariably the reason given is "It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." which to me means that other people marked it as spam instead of properly just unsubscribing.

I understand that it used to be very difficult or impossible to unsubscribe from stuff, but nowaways it's easier than ever as emails are basically required to have a one or two click unsubscribe system.

I get plenty of "newsletters" I never signed up for. Those deserve to be marked as spam. I can't trust that the unsubscribe link isn't used to harvest email addresses that are still in active use, so clicking one of those links is a net negative for me.

Hm, but if you marked them as "done" in inbox they should have been archived in gmail and not show as "unread" on the app icon as that only shows unread in inbox? That's they way it works for me at least. I use inbox and gmail both as apps on my iPhone and in the browser. I've been archiving and marked e-mails as "done" without reading them for years and never had this problem.

It's just as "meaningless" as having any other number badge on your home screen...

I don't like incorrect unread counts lying around.

I then cannot distinguish between truly unread emails and the emails that I swiped as Done in Inbox, but still left unread in Gmail.

The unread count is correct; you didn't really _read_ those emails. The problem is that the UI is placing undue emphasis on the number of emails you didn't read; that's a pretty irrelevant statistic. Half of the emails I receive don't need to be read; just glancing at the subject is enough.

Inbox got it right by not showing unread counts and just letting you mark emails as done when they're no longer needed.

Under your definition, the unread count is too low. Gmail counts something as read after you load its contents, not after you read it.

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