A friend of mine called me the other day asking for email help. He said that of his three accounts in Mail.app, only the Gmail account was showing. When I opened his Mac, this is what I found: Now, not even my SPAM riddled Yahoo account, which I haven't used for years now, has that many unread messages. Since this was setup as an IMAP, this means that those 40,000+ messages are truly unread (i.e. not 40,000+ newly downloaded messages, it truly is 40,000+ UNREAD messages). Consider also that Gmail has one of the most effective SPAM filtering mechanisms in the world, this is probably the most incredible computer related scenes I've ever come across. I just had to take a picture of it to share with you guys. And here I thought that I was bad with my 300+ unread messages. I started this thread because maybe other MUGgers out there have similarly incredible but true email stories. I don't think anyone can top this though.
I think at one time I used up the max per folder in Outlook. Its like 100K plus or something. They were all server notifications, separated to a folder using Rules.
not mine, but biggest i've seen is about 5,200 unread messages. scary thing is, messages were not spam!
Let me reiterate that my friend's 40,000+ emails hardly has any spam in it. He's just one of those types whose made it a career to forward all kinds of email, from virus warnings, to health information, to useless facts, etc. My dad was that way. A senior citizen who found a new pastime in email. He actually maxxed out his Gmail back when it allocated less than 3GB of space per user. 60% of his emails came from one friend, another senior who did nothing but send him at least 20 emails a day, a lot of which had attached videos and images. But this friend of mine is not a senior citizen. He still works and runs his own companies.
Here's what my Yahoo! Mail inbox looks like. This is an account I haven't used since the late 90's and is nothing more than a SPAM box now. 100% of all the email in there is SPAM.
not really incredible, but true, and amusing: this is about a friend of mine, first-time to use email, several months ago. her husband passed by her as she was typing in front of the computer: "Dear Mailer Daemon, Thank you for notifying me about my returned email..." her son came in a few minutes later after noticing the grin on his father's face as he hovered above his mom. he quickly told her what the daemon is. cute no?
When I leave my computer for 1 week, I instantly get 100 messages waiting to be read, 75% of which are spam, some are youtube notifications hardly any friend emails etc. Not astronomically up par with your frien's email but It's really a pain to read through all, especially if you know one of it is important.
Isn't it that forwarding mails, warnings, useless facts are "categorically" spamming as well? Or the emails contain even personal messages? if yes, that is really amazing.
my mom is exactly like your dad Elbert. Except she stays up late nights reading and forwarding emails. She takes it so seriously like it's work for her. And if my sister and I ignore any of her fwd messages, she considers it being ignored My gmail inbox is 6k. Thanks a lot to newsletters . . .
for me as long as the messages are unsolicited and/or sent in bulk to people you don't even know (not that all spam show cc's) , they're spam. oh, the 5,200 unread messages i mentioned are all work related. i guess that 's what you get working in the IT dept of a huge company trying to roll-out a new system/software
he he he. That can be reached in a a couple of days. All you need to do is sign up for high volume yahoo groups.
40k+ unread e-mails? Jeez... The obsessive-compulsive in me wouldn't let that number go past 5! I remember the Jim Carrey movie "Bruce Almighty", where he decided to have all prayers received as e-mails, hahaha...
