I was originally thinking of doing away with an unread count in general. It seems that, while this information may be interesting at times, it actually does little to help you accurately assess where you are in terms of processing and responding to the information. There are a lot of different ways to deal with it though, so thanks for sharing!

I tend to open an email, read it, and if more action on my part is necessary later on mark it as unread again. The “starred”, “important”, etc labels don’t have the same power to me as “unread” (typically lacking an overall count and feeling overall easier for me to ignore/forget about). Other times, like everyone else, I’ll see the subject or sender and not read the message until later, dismissing the notification on whatever device I happen to be using at the time (phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop). It’d be nice if I dismiss that notification, leaving the message unread, if the server stored info that I had seen an alert so my other devices would know whether or not I’d like to be notified again about that particular email (being a user-configurable option, of course).

Perhaps I’m more of an edge case with this behavior. My original idea with this was for instant messaging, where it seems to make more sense for everyone. You’re logged into Google Talk on your computer, tablet, and phone. Google’s already fairly smart at only sending the first message of a new conversation to all devices and then limiting subsequent messages to whichever one you responded from (although something seems to have changed in Gmail recently on this point…). With a saved state, when you respond on one device, your others would get a status message from the server letting them know you’ve seen the conversation and don’t need the original notification any more.

Just something to keep in mind if you get into the idea of making notifications about email smarter. I also love how Google decided however many years ago to keep all your chats as email threads in your Gmail account. Totally awesome and endlessly helpful.