E-mail notification HOSED!

False e-mail notification. It alerts me that I have new msgs, several times an hour/day, but no new messages. Each time I DO get a new message, the # count on the msg icon continues to increase by the number of new msgs received. Reading/deleting new messages does NOT make the new msg icon go away, it just keeps increasing the # of msgs displayed when I hover the cursor over icon. Rebooting does NOT rectify this problem. This problem started 4-5 days ago.