This tip was suggested by reader Chem Dizzle, Esquire, after he spent a lot of time cleaning his Gmail Inbox.  Gmail can hold a lot of mail.  My own primary mail account on Gmail has not quite 1400 in its Inbox, and Gmail tells me I’ve used only 2% of the space they’ve made available for me.  On a single page Gmail only displays 50 at a time, however.  Chem spent a lot of time processing his entire Inbox 50 messages at a time because he overlooked the mechanism that allows every message in a mailbox to be selected at once.  This is how it works:

I have lots of mail. I want to select everything.

The picture above is an annotated excerpt of the Gmail interface.  The pictured area is right above the list of messages in the selected mailbox, near the top of the screen.  Click the “all” link to select all messages in the mailbox.  Every message you can see will get a checkbox next to it and its background will turn gold (or possibly a different color if you’ve selected an alternate theme).  You’ll also see something like this:

That's some, not all. We can do better.

It is really clear here, but that line is easily overlooked because it looks very similar to everything in the mailbox.  The entire center of the interface turns gold and that message blends in.  Click the link indicated and you’ll have everything in the mailbox, even the messages you can’t see.  It will look like this:

That's what I'm talking about.

Now you can easily delete, move or label every message in that mailbox all at once. For my Inbox that would be a 28-fold increase in my productivity.  Score!

Tagged as: email, gmail