Is there any way to have Gmail folders show total unread count (including subfolders)

Question

I sometimes miss unread emails because they are sitting in sub folders

Let's say I have a folder called Trips with 3 sub folders called, Florida, Boston, Washington respectively.

If Florida has one unread mail and Boston has two unread mails, I would like Trips to show 3 unread. By default it seems like it shows 0 because there are no unread mails in the actual Trips folders (not counting sub folders).

Is there any way to change this behavior?

Answer 1

Some suggestions that might help:

1. Unread mail folders still appear in BOLD (Edit: if you keep them collapsed), so you should see Trips as opposed to Trips (even though there won't be a message count).
2. In Gmail Label Settings you can choose to show them in the left menu if they contain unread messages. You could set the option to show if unread (so the label will only appear on the left if there are unread messages).
3. (I didn't test this) I think you can choose three distinct labels, e.g., Boston, Florida, Trips (without nesting them). Make sure all Boston and Florida emails are also tagged Trips (a filter could do this?). This might get you the message count, but it is probably not easy to make sure the messages are consistently labeled.