Inbox zero Gmail hack

UPDATE : Several major improvements on the following :

1. Create a Gmail filter for an asterisk inside quotation marks - i.e. :
   
   "*"
   
   (but INCLUDE the quotation marks)
   
   The action for this filter should be to apply a label to new messages.  The label should be something like "aaa new" or "0new" or "0" or whatever you choose.
   
2. Why the "aaa" or "0" or similar at the start of the label name?  If you're like me, you have dozens of labels, so much so that only a small set are visible in the default Gmail view.
   
   They are sorted alphabetically, and so putting "aaa" or "0" or punctuation at the start of the label name, means the label will handily appear at the top of the label list, always readily accessible.
   
   But do note that there is advantage to this label name being short, because the longer the label name, the less of each email's subject line is visible when skimming through newly received emails.  (Of course, if you view the newly received emails by clicking on the label, Gmail is smart enough to not additionally show that label on each email in the list, but I like to have the flexibility to efficiently use this system both from the dedicated label and from the Priority Inbox, which I love.)
   
3. Finally, add a pleasant label color to this new label.

Voila!  Now all newly received emails have a little splash of color, alerting you to their arrival, and now you remove the "aaa new" label to indicate you've seen it.  You still get all the benefits of the approach described in the original article (below), with the added benefit that if you remove the "aaa new" label from a conversation, and then a new message arrives as part of that conversation, voila - the conversation is labeled "aaa new" again, which is exactly what we want!

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I like the idea of looking at a nice, empty inbox, but in practice I find it almost impossible with the state of email management tools today.

Yes, I can tell you how email should work, and that would result in "inbox zero".

But say we're stuck in 2014 and Gmail is about the best we have, and we like the Priority Inbox and Non-Priority Inbox distinction and we want to leave emails showing as Unread until we actually get around to reading them, ...

... but we also want an easy way to sweep older emails out of the way so we can tell at a glance what has newly arrived?

e.g. once or several times daily batch reviewing of new emails.

My first thought was to make a cool custom Gmail plugin.  Nice, but obviously lots of work.  Very nice, but very lots of work.  I imagined having a divider you could drag up or down to mark the point below which you have reviewed emails and above which are emails you haven't yet seen.

Much simpler, of course, would be to make a Gmail label and have all new mail automatically get that label, and then on your daily or other occasional look in your Gmail, search for "label:inbox label:newarrival", or such like.  Once you've skimmed through the emails and are happy for them to disappear from your "new arrivals - not yet seen" list, you bulk select and remove the label.

Or, even simpler to set up, do what I did just now, and create a label called "seen".  As a once-off setup step, bulk select all thousands of emails cluttering your Inbox, and label them "seen".  Now, when you want to find out what emails are new arrivals, search for "label:inbox -label:seen".  Once you've skimmed through them, and left in the inbox anything you want to read later (hence you don't want to mark it read) or otherwise action later (hence you don't want to "Archive" it, which is the only way to remove it from the Inbox), you bulk select them and add the "seen" label to them.

Voila!  Now you have an email system that actually fits the way you use the system - "inbox" means "I plan or hope or would like to do something about this one day", "unread" means "I plan or hope or would like to read this one day", and "seen" means (drumroll) "I saw this email in the list and have determined that it should stay in the list, but I don't need to see it again when I next check for new emails".  And that leaves stars - those oft-abused little creatures - to actually be used for what we intuitively think a star should represent, which is something special, not something commonplace.  Read/unread, inboxed/archived, seen/unseen are commonplace distinctions, and stars have no business representing them.

And that's how I finally got the blissful peace of an uncluttered email "inbox" that works pretty well, and only took minutes to set up, and is trivially easy to maintain - so easy to maintain that I can even easily catch up again in future if I fall behind due to sickness or travel or whatever!  Nice!  Viva labels!

UPDATE : Of course, what this does not give me is notification of new emails added to previously-seen conversations still in my inbox.  That is a problem, although in my particular case, not too great a problem, because a) emails that are likely to be part of ongoing conversations are likely to end up in the Priority Inbox for me; and b) I like the Priority Inbox and still periodically look through it; and c) when a new email arrives for an existing conversation, that conversation jumps to the top of the Priority Inbox.  Altogether, this means I have a good chance of noticing that an older conversation has jumped atop the list.  (Most of the emails I receive go into Inbox not Priority Inbox.)