Stopping GMail showing new messages

Question

I find notifications of new messages (even seeing the number of unread new messages) very distracting. But I value using GMail's interface - with labels, conversation view, keyboard shortcuts, and syncing drafts across my machines. Are there any ways in which I can do so but block notifications of new messages? The simplest way would be to make Gmail only check for new messages manually, as you can do with desktop clients like Apple Mail.

The only way I've found is to use GMail offline in Chrome but disable my internet.

Answer 1

Just create labels, filter that will mark every new email that you receive as read.

Every time you open GMail you will have to manually realise as to which messages on top of the list are not read by you.

Or else you can use labels, filters to move messages to another folder and not display in Inbox, this way the notification is moved out of the title and front view and gets hidden in the more area where you will have to scroll with mouse to see the unread count.

To create filter that marks messages as being read if they are new and in the inbox, you can use the following search for the filter:

label:unread label:inbox

Using this filters search terms you can use the Mark as read option for the filter.