i am one of those OCD people who hate seeing unread emails in her inbox.... however, i do like seeing when i have notifications, they keep me busy at work.

I do like that we now have a name for the dumb emails we chose to receive, but that still annoy us anyway.
Seriously, when I go on vacation, my Inbox clogs up with 100s of emails, and very few of them are personal emails sent just to me. It's kind of sad, really.

I just use Gmail's filtering system to full effect. I get tons of Bacn, but all the stuff from Apple, Ticketmaster, etc. gets filtered into "Sales and Promos" and all the stuff from social sites such as Facebook and Sugar gets filtered into their own boxes named appropriately. That way it skips my inbox, so I don't get my hopes up when my Gmail notifier says I have 16 messages, but when I'm scrolling through my mail I can see how many new Sales e-mails, Facebook e-mails, Sugar e-mails, etc. So this stuff doesn't tend to bother me