Selecting ALL mails in Gmail

Earlier on today I wanted to archive a bunch (over 7000) emails from within the Gmail web app. My inbox was overflowing, it was time to archive.

In the old interface, I’d select all on the page using the tick box at the very top of the message window, a yellow box would then pop up asking if I wanted to select ALL (not just all on that page, but every single mail I had under that label). I’d click the text in the yellow box, all would be selected and I could move, archive or delete away.

In the new Gmail web app interface, this select all emails option didn’t exist. I could select all 50 emails in the message window, but not the other 6950. If I have to do them in batches of 50, this is going to take a while.

The answer to the problem is a simple one, but one it took me a while to work out.

You’ll only see this issue if you’re using one of the new inbox views. I have mine set to display unread mails first:

No matter how you do it, whilst in this view, the maximum messages that can be selected in one go is the number available in the message window (50 in my case).

What you have to do is hover over the inbox label heading, click the disclosure arrow that appears and select ‘Classic’ from the views menu:

Once you’ve selected classic view, go to the select all tick box, click it and the familiar yellow bar will appear letting you select ALL messages.

That’s it – you can now delete all those emails offering to make you rich/bigger/rich & bigger…