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Yeah, that's one of the most valuable tips I got from the whole GTD thing: stop your email client notifying you when new email arrives. Productive email is asynchronous.

Closing it down is best, but when I accidentally leave it open I still don't want the message count visible. In addition to enabling the Labs feature to turn off the inbox count in the web UI, I also have a one-line Greasemonkey script to remove it from the document/tab title.

I actually have a filter that marks all my incoming mail as "read" precisely to avoid this problem. It might seem heavy-handed, but this solution works even when working inside Gmail itself.

there's also a gmail lab's feature to turn the unread email count off

I use HTML based version (faster and less prone to JS glitches) and there's no gmail number in title.

You should give keyboard shortcut a try (require JS). This alone forces me to use JS in gmail.