I have been trying to remove 2 “unread emails” from my Gmail account (on iPhone and iPad) for DAYS. I had looked at many webpages and Quora and Reddit posts.

It’s easy to overlook some messages in Gmail. In this article, we provide instructions on how to make Gmail show only unread emails, how to search for unread emails only, and how to add parameters to those searches.

Source: How to Find All Unread Messages in Gmail

It wasn’t ANY of the many good suggestions that worked in the linked article or the forum posts. I simply logged into mail.google.com on my laptop for the first time in 2 years and saw that I had 2 very old “Hangout” requests from friends from more than 5 years back. They were marked “unread.” So I read them, realized I’d never acted on them, deleted them… and WAH-LAH the little red “2” marker is gone from my iOS devices. They were vestiges of these ancient hangouts, apparently. The image shows my inbox – clear of unread hangouts. Wish I had screenshotted FIRST, deleted second.

Once again, deprecated Google functionality was screwing something up for me!

Now, I really should see about deleting the tags, buttons, and category that refer to Google+