‘You have HOW MANY unread emails?’ PC Gamer shares their inbox shame
A PC Gamer editor has shared their personal experience with overwhelming email volume, highlighting how the medium has become increasingly difficult to manage. The writer receives approximately 56 emails between midnight and 8:00 am daily, with expectations exceeding 100 by day’s end. Projecting forward, they estimate receiving around 4,000 additional emails by the end of October and approximately 50,000 total emails in 2026 when combining work and personal accounts.
Despite implementing substantial filtering infrastructure—including 284 email filters, nearly 200 blocked addresses, and their publisher’s email security system—the volume remains unmanageable. The security system alone diverted 27 emails to spam on a single day. Despite these technical countermeasures, finding genuinely useful emails among the deluge has become increasingly difficult.
The piece underscores how email has become “a waking nightmare” for the author, with unread email counts creating constant notification stress on phones and desktop clients. The excerpt suggests frustration with the medium’s inability to effectively separate important communications from the ever-increasing tide of unwanted messages, even with multiple layers of filtering in place.