How to Delete/Hide Unread Mail Messages (emails) from the Welcome Screen in Windows XP/Vista/7

As you know right after you boot Windows 7 (as well as Windows XP and Windows Vista) the system greets you with the famous Logon Screen or Welcome Screen. Such screens, apart from displaying the User Accounts available on the machine, also show you a specific message telling you the number of mail messages you still have to read on your email client (such as Microsoft Outlook, for example). Let’s see how to delete and hide the “You have unread messages” notification from your Windows operating system!

1. Click Start.
2. In the Search field (Run…if you have XP) type regedit and press Enter.
3. Locate this registry folder for the actual logged on user: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\ UnreadMail
4. Locate this registry folder for all the users available on the computer: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\ UnreadMail.
5. On the right pane, locate and click the key named MessageExpiryDays
6. If such a key doesn’t exsit, right click any empty space and from the menu click: create new DWORD value data, name it MessageExpiryDays
7. Click the registry key and change its vale to 0 (zero).
8. Exit regedit.
9. Reboot your compute for the changes to take effect.