ON GOOGLE'S "MASS-DELETE" SPAM FEATURE

ALL...BEGONE...

Google is apparently rolling out a feature I've long waited for, as an avid user of it's Gmail service.  As blog Google Operating System explains:

Gmail has a great spam filter, but the spam is hard to delete. And that's a problem if you get hundreds of spam messages everyday. Gmail is rolling out a new link called "Delete all spam messages now" so you don't have to repeatedly select all messages and delete them. If you don't see the link yet, you'll find there in the next days.

Glad to see this feature is almost out the door.  With most email users in the US seeing 75-to 80% of their daily emails in their inboxes as spam, the tools to deal with this stuff need to allow for much more efficient solutions.

The next related feature I'd like is the ability to "mass-delete" emails through the depths of the Gmail inbox. 

For example, say you want to delete all "unstarred" emails.  Today, it's something that would tediously take the user a screen by screen effort to do, through potentially thousands of screen pages if you've got several hundred megabytes of emails stored up (like yours truly).

A mass-delete feature like the one for the Spam folder outlined above, would make Gmail almost perfect.

If they wanted to do one better, it'd be the ability to "mass-report" several screenfuls of emails as Spam, thus building up the spam filter database. 

Now that would make the service even more almost perfect.

Just one user's opinion.

Comments

[candice]

What would be nice is to delete the results of a search, which, as of now, you have to do in 50 message chunks.

[NostradamusZen]

I subscribe to the CSS Mailing list [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] - I often don't have time to read all the contributions, and just select 'unstarred', label them 'CSS', and archive them so that I can search for reference questions when I face a CSS problem - but I can't find a filter to select 'unstarred' - any ideas anyone? Thanks!