Between midnight and 8:00 am this morning I received 56 emails. By the end of today that number will be well over a hundred, by the end of October I'll have about 4,000 more, and my total for 2026 will be in the neighborhood of 50,000 (work and personal combined.)
Fifty. Thousand. Emails. In a year! That's with (and I just counted) the 284 email filters I've set up to keep out at least some of the garbage, nearly 200 blocked addresses, and our publisher's own hypervigilant email security system in place—which diverted 27 emails to spam today alone. That makes it incredibly difficult to stay on top of the actual useful emails we want to see when we open our inboxes.
Email has become a waking nightmare, so that ugly red number on your phone or desktop showing you how many unread emails you have? Despite my headline up there, it really shouldn't be a source of stress and shame. It's not your fault email turned out this way.
So let's air it out. All of us! This week I asked my coworkers how many unread emails they have, and you can see their answers (and explanations) below. We welcome you to try to top us in the comments.
UNREAD EMAILS: 780
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor
"This total is actually good for me, the result of spending an obscene amount of time over the past few years(!!!) setting up filters and unsubscribing from mailing lists I never signed up for. If I'd asked this question a couple years ago it would be a number too big to comprehend. This is a victory, believe it or not."
UNREAD EMAILS: 4,854
Kara Phillips, Video Producer
"The minute this number ticks over, like, 10, I'm not going to clear it out for a good while. Anything important I open right away, and deal with. There's just so much junk all the time, always, that I don't want to waste my time going through it. I've got places to go. People to see. Emails to not read when I get to those places. Life's too short to keep an eye on my inbox 24/7."
UNREAD EMAILS: 38,523
Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
"Help, I'm the longest-serving member of PC Gamer in the publication's history. I have emails with most figures from the last 20 years of gaming, including [reaches arm into bottomless inbox, grabs something at random] a 2012 email with Notch saying that he was looking forward to (but also nervous about) participating in a PAX panel I was moderating. In emails from 2010, we were still including our AOL Instant Messenger handles in our email signatures. Time is an entropic scourge."
"I am an embodied sack of anxiety and if my unread mail gets over 300 I may permanently transition to a different state of matter" — Lauren Morton, Lead SEO Editor
UNREAD EMAILS: 5,488
Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer
"The combo of endless notifications you get working for a corporation (i.e. emails I see but don't need to be read) plus a job that necessitates being on loads of different press lists, really does just breed a vast quantity of emails. Although, my personal account is hovering at a similar number…"
UNREAD EMAILS: 18
Phil Savage, Global Editor-In-Chief
"I use unread emails as a sort of unofficial to-do list, which means quickly clearing away the ones that are junk, and leaving the others in stasis until I'm ready to respond. This is not the perfect system: one of the unread emails is from January, but clearing it means figuring out my pension plan—I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment yet."
UNREAD EMAILS: 760
Joshua Wolens, News Writer
"The true number of unread emails—that is, emails I literally have not read—in my inbox is far higher, surely somewhere in the tens of thousands. Fortunately, I have a robust system: I mark everything as read when the unread count hits 1k. Almost time to do it again, looks like. Gets earlier and earlier every month."
"Those emails just keep coming. They never stop. They will never stop. I am powerless." — Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware
UNREAD EMAILS: 49,925
Andy Chalk, US News Lead:
"I get a lot of emails. It's part of the job. Unfortunately, the Gmail web client I'm forced to use is a barely functional piece of crap, so this is what happens. (PS. If you're a rep on the verge of getting really mad at me, I promise that I look at all my headers. Simmer down.)"
UNREAD EMAILS: 45,664
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor
"A period of unmedicated ADHD and a bunch of PRs who send press releases to both of my email addresses, which end up in the same inbox and mean I get to ignore all their emails twice. I've recently started necking 15 mg of Ritalin every day, let's see if that changes anything."
UNREAD EMAILS: 17
Robert Jones, Print Editor
"This is actually a lot for me, as usually I am a guy who likes to clear his inbox down to zero unread emails daily. I also like to frequently empty my spam folder. Basically, I like a super clean inbox. A day off from work, though, has left me in this position. I will have this rectified by close of play today, though, naturally."
UNREAD EMAILS: 5
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor
[Ted was unreachable for comment at press time, but while his unread total is immensely respectful, this is his work email total. His personal inbox total is a whole other story. I won't share that number because... just look at his smiling face. I can't murk my guy like that. —Chris]
UNREAD EMAILS: 39,608
Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware
"I read the good ones, I ignore the rest. Life is too short."
UNREAD EMAILS: 37,332
Tim Clark, Editorial Director, Games
"I will never know the light of God's grace again."
📩 PC GAMER'S UNREAD EMAIL HALL OF FAME 📩
UNREAD EMAILS: 0
Lauren Morton, Lead SEO Editor
"This fluctuates from 0 to 50+ throughout the day. Like the rest of us, I get about 100 press releases about GAME ANNOUNCEMENT and [NEWS] and PATCH NOTES every day. I skim the subject lines, read the relevant ones, use a big batch "mark as read" on the rest, and file them away into a "press releases" folder like a filing cabinet for me to search if necessary. All I want is to have line-of-sight on the thread of active interview questions I'm pursuing and that important email from Evan I shouldn't forget about."
UNREAD EMAILS: 76,547
Fraser Brown, Online Editor
"I could blame the fact that I've worked here for almost a decade, but others have been here for longer. I could blame ADHD, but I work in the games industry—who doesn't have ADHD? So instead I will just admit it: I really can't be arsed reading my emails. If I've replied to you, you are one of the Chosen few. Congratulations. "
What's your unread email count? We'd love if you popped into the comments below and gave us an exact number!
(Please don't email us about it.)
