emailiphonenotifications
Basically I would like to have two email accounts setup on my iPhone 4, one my personal account and one for work.
However for the work account, I'd like to not have it's unread message count included in the number of unread messages displayed as a part of the Mail app's icon (the number in the red circle).
Is this possible to do?
Short of getting a different mail client on your iPad I can get you more than half of the way there.
Set up gmail as Microsoft Exchange server (leave the domain blank, add user and password and let it try to connect. When it fails, use m.google.com for the server and you can choose mail, calendar, address data to use ActiveSync)
Once the first mail sync starts, you can then choose days to sync and which subfolders will have push enabled. The mail badge count still only reflects unread messages in the Inbox, but you will get the mail notification sound/vibration for any new push message arriving in your selected subfolders. Your iOS device will be ready to go when you tap into the folders that have new push messages.
Mail does only look at one or all mailboxes for the count, it is set in Mail->Preferences->General, the field "Doc unread count"
You can make it look at a more complex setup by using Smart mailboxes.
In this case I would create a new Smart mailbox say Counter which would contain rules for any of Mailbox is Inbox and the destination folder.
Best Answer
You can effectively turn off push notifications for a particular email account... sort of. Go to the Settings app, and hit "Mail, Contacts, Calendars". Go to "Fetch New Data", then scroll down and go to "Advanced". For the email account whose little red badges you don't want, change the setting to "Manual" instead of "Push".
This will prevent new messages from pushing a notification icon to the home screen. However, when you open the Mail app to check your other email, the app will sync the "Manual" account with the server and you'll get a badge if there are unread messages there. So, like bmike mentioned, the real way to get rid of those badges is to get closer to inbox zero.