I agree that a "star" is better than the information "unread" gives.
Some MUAs provide "new", "unread", "total" and set a flag, if new
unread mail is in a folder, that was marked by the user, so only
threads with new mails we are interested in get a flag.
__
For the sake of comparison since you said, "OK, I use several clients,
and none do this.", in recent times I use 5 email clients and how they
work pertaining to this is as follows (let's get down to real details
rather than being vague that we use a lot of them):
TheBat! - Not so well known bu
Generally they don't show the count of the inbox. I was being a little
too generic. Generally, each parent folder shows the total count of
unread emails in it and it's child folders.
The account name is consider the parent of all so it shows the total
unread emails in the account.
There's no
