My incessant struggle to organize my GMail account and respond to all emails has now been remedied, thanks to the new Inbox rolled out by Google just recently.
I actually first noticed this yesterday and have been using it ever since.

I been battling around 580+ of un-opened messages buried somewhere the 19,600 or so emails in my Inbox. This morning, I was able to bring that number down to only 27 (also found out I had dozens of un-answered emails from 2010).

GMail is really improving their services to equal or surpass other provider of email. It is an advantage to them if they magnet more email user to their site.