Please know upfront that this whole post gives me a bit of anxiety and my heart has started beating faster writing it. The trigger is: unread emails. Not mine, thank gawd, but Chris Pratt’s. What happened was Chris posted to his IG stories that he’d let his son, Jack, play with his phone, like countless parents. But Jack was fascinated by the glowing number that indicates how many unread emails are sitting in Chris’ inbox. Why? Because it was 35,944! I just lost the feeling in my right arm. I can’t – how does one let that happen? Does Chris never look at his phone? More importantly, what does one do with this travesty? Well, if you’re Chris, you accidentally delete your entire inbox. Read the excerpt while I go breathe into a paper bag.
hris Pratt revealed something on his phone that made his son, Jack, 7, gasp “in shock” when he saw it: his unread emails number!
“Yesterday my son was playing with my phone and gasped in shock looking a the number of unread emails that I had,” the 40-year-old actor said on his Instagram Story. “It’s a lot.” The number was officially 35,944 unread emails.
“I get it. I know,” Chris continued. “It’s mostly junk. See what I do is I sign up for everything. I’m one of those idiots who will do, like, an IQ test. It’ll be like, ‘Wanna take an IQ test? Gimme your email!’ And then I do, which proves my IQ is about seven. And I just get junk from everyone and I just don’t erase it.”
“If you’re watching this and you’re one of those people, I’m sorry. But I’m gonna try. I’m gonna try to get back to you. I’m working on it right now,” he continued. He came back later to add that he had then accidentally sent 51,000 emails to the trash to be permanently deleted.
Most permanent delete options in mail are a two-step process, right? First, they get sent to trash and then they can be permanently deleted? I mean don’t get me wrong, I know plenty of people that would delete their whole mailbox if they attempted any function beyond “open,” but I assume Chris is a bit more tech savvy than that. But that’s not the point, how does one get to 35K unread emails? If I have more than 20 read emails, I have to start cleaning up my inbox. I have so many folders and sub-labels you need the Dewey decimal system to find something. I have, no joke, four active emails – one professional, one for my writing community (non-work), one for personal and one for home stuff (bills, charity, school communication, etc.). I sweep through them all the time to clean up spam, sort through promos and archive things I may need to reference later. The only things in any of my inboxes are items that I need to action now or in the near future. The only – ONLY – mailbox I have notifications turned on for is work (in case CB has a gossip emergency for me!) Because if that red bubble pops up with any number in it, I can feel it on my skin. It will call to me like the Tell-Tale Heart until I address it.
And I don’t think Chris accidentally did anything. I think he didn’t want to deal with wading through that volume of emails and it was easier to get rid of them. I did that to my mom’s inbox once. She dumps her Gmail into her Safari Mail and the amount of stuff she had in both was ridiculous. So I basically deleted any name I didn’t recognize. I have to admit, it felt good. Like really good. I know Chris is popular, but I can’t imagine he gets 35K in a day. The unread plus the 20K+ he deleted along with them – he’s been sitting on those for a while. Anyone that wanted a reply will follow-up like he suggested. He knew what he was doing.
ETA – I didn’t realize many people have this many unread emails. I don’t think my way is the ‘right’ way to do email, it’s just the only way I can do email.
How many unread emails are oyu allowed, Chris?
Photo credit: Instagram and WENN/Avalon
I understand Chris Pratt. Right now I have several thousand emails in my inbox. Every so often I sweep through the subject lines to see if anything is at critical mass. No folders or any organization of any kind. After all these years, I have come to understand that I thrive in chaos. And its ok.
20, 396 as of today. I hit 20k this month and that’s when I realized-I HAVE A PROBLEM. I know that in the last couple years, about 50% of them have been political e-mails and I don’t have the energy to run them down and delete them.
I guess I could spend the shutdown purging my Inbox. Mais non!
I feel you so hard with your last sentence!!
I have about 30 or 40k. The last time I did a mass clean was 5 years ago because my BIL saw my phone (I left it in his car) and was utterly horrified by the number and basically shamed me into dealing with it 😂
I do small deletes but normal every morning I just skim my email and open what has to be read, ignoring mailing lists, alumni emails, etc and so every day the number grows and grows and then eventually it is in the tens of thousands and I am like “well I am never cleaning this up now”.
Use chuck. It’s an app that lets you sort and mass delete. Best thing ever
I have a lot of unread emails, but I don’t understand why. It was about 45 one day then it read about 425, which is impossible. Unless it’s counting all of my emails including the ones I have read. Now I am going to go through and clear them out. Also, if he backs up his phone before he downloads an update, he can upload that last back up. It’s that easy!
I have 292,328.
I have three email accounts – my work account, my personal account, and my yahoo account that I use for junk and shopping. I keep the first two in check, but I don’t even bother deleting from the third. I probably get 10 emails/day from retailers – it can add up quickly. Plus, I don’t really care and have better things to do than delete sale messages from J Crew.
I have over 100k emails in my inbox and most of them are unread junk.
Someone please tell me how to bulk delete them 😂😬
Use the email filter feature to find all the emails from, say, J. Crew. Immediately unsubscribe from it; you can always resubscribe if you miss the emails. Select all of those filtered emails and delete them. Then do Williams Sonoma, etc. and each of the retailers you aren’t interested in. Then empty your Trash and feel better 🙂
And set up a separate account for these subscriptions. Then they won’t contaminate your important email.
That’s how I roll too. I get so many marketing ones that I may want to look at later, or things I may donate to if there is money after paying bills, so I don’t delete right away. Once I get to 2000, I start with the last marketing one, do a search, delete all, proceed to the next until I am comfortably below my number. I have tons of old ones, including from my mom who is no longer with us, that I don’t want to part with (or print out). Some are keeping track of family business that I might want for future business; mostly whining from my brother so I can show him that he got exactly what he asked for. It’s very satisfying 😄
I also love reading through old threads from my BFF too!
I use something called unroll.me (I think that’s the name).
And for paper subscriptions, https://catalogchoice.org/ will help you unsubscribe from junk mail.
I also hate unread emails. The only “unread” ones are important, so I don’t forget to answer them / waiting for an answer / important info (currently 9 on my work email address).
Me too! I have 5 unread in my personal email, and no unread in my work email. Unread emails stress me out
I just….I don’t even know what to say…..unread emails in the thousands? I can’t even imagine. I open my email get 7, and I’m like whoa! What the hell? I must lead a very different life! Lol.
Lol, me too.
With you! I can’t imagine….
I have two emails, one for important stuff, work, kids school etc. The other I just give out for newsletters, mailing lists etc.
I just had this conversation with friends and was appalled at them having thousands of unread emails. Having spam and junk email mixed in with your work email is madness to me, why not separate it out?? My friend said has to check her work email obsessively because she misses important stuff a lot due to it getting lost, I showed her how to separate it all out and hide her junk mail, she was like “Oh that makes it a lot easier!” NO KIDDING!!
It’s a good method, honestly. Now the people who are really waiting for a reply will probably contact him again and the rest couldn’t have been that important.
My work inbox cannot have more than 80 emails when I go home. And that’s total. There’s no way to keep track otherwise and as an assistant, that’s the death of me. But I have colleagues with thousands of emails, they just never clean out their inbox. I would go insane.
Takes less than 3 minutes to either respond, sort, delete.
At that #, most must have been garbage to begin with. No loss.
IRL, junking up your phone, iPad and not keeping up with it, would bug me a lot.
I grew up in chaos. I enjoy having things tidy and up to date, much less stress for me.
Not when you get to these numbers. When I was on leave between jobs, I got my yahoo account down to 7,000 – and that took hours upon hours. That was about 8 years ago and that account is over 280,000.
I think I have around 7k in my main Gmail account. I told myself cleaning it out would be one of my tasks during quarantine! I think it builds up because of the way Gmail sorts emails into promotions and social in addition to the primary tab. I never look at the other two tabs unless I need a specific coupon or confirmation code, so they just build and build.
Work emails are obviously a different story, though. I keep up with them daily.
I currently have 16,107. For the same reasons as Chris. I only read the ones from work or the kids school and the rest are junk. I googled how to mark everything as read in gmail, but it didn’t work for me.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one, I have about 40k, but I don’t have my notifications on! I couldn’t handle seeing the number on my screen.
yay! im not alone. i have tens of thousands of undeleted emails too!
I have thousands of “unread” work emails, none of which are spam. The number of emails sent around at work are insane. I read the subject, the preview, determine whether it’s something I need to open and see the full body, and move on. There are many sent to the general team listserv, or the emails are one word like “thanks” or something along those lines. I’m not allowed to delete my work emails (law firm); technically I should make an effort to sort them and I have tried. But immediately after I get my inbox down to a reasonable number (around 100 was my goal) by the end of the week I end up having 500 unread emails. So I’ve given up.
I think I have 300 plus and it’s mostly junk. Unread text messages though- that shit scares me. When people have dozens of unread texts that just seems so weird!
I can’t stand having the little notification, I am always at zero. I delete often, and leave any that I might need in the inbox, but read so there’s no notification.
And then I did accidentally delete my entire inbox a few weeks. I freaked out for a moment, and then figured oh well.
Without a doubt this is the most relatable thing I’ve read about Chris Pratt. I know it was probably super stressful for him to realize all those emails got deleted BUT oh the relief he must have also felt, knowing they’re just gone on one fell swoop! Don’t worry Chris, you’ll probably be back up to 35,000 again soon.
Lock him up
Lock him up
Lock him up
🤪🤪🤪🤪