The Hopeless Email Battle

See: The Hopeless Email Battle (by Jeremy Zawodny)
I do the same things for Outlook and Thunderbird, and unfortunately there is no good way to manage the unread mess. I keep waiting for one of these email clients to come out and allow you to auto-age email, i.e. if I don’t read something past x days, mark it as some status other than read that does not show up as unread.