I use Gmail, and I subscribe to a few high-traffic e-mail lists. The good thing is that I can use Google’s powerful search to find anything on those mailing lists. The downside is that I have all these unread messages piling up in each label I’ve assigned to a list. This means that I cannot make things un-bold, and thus, all my little labels have daunting unread counts besides them (e.g. 17,000 messages waiting in “:ruby-talk”). Well, actually, I can, but I would have to do the following procedure:

1. Visit the :ruby-talk label.
2. Click on “select all”
3. Click on the dropdown list for “more options” and select “Mark all read”
4. Click the pager link to advance to the next oldest set of messages
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all messages have been marked as read.

Keep in mind that Gmail only lets you see a maximum of 100 messages on the page at any given time. Thus, I would have had to repeat steps 2-4 above 170 times just to mark all read. I have better things to do than that. Oh, and I did try to do this via the Gmail API, but you can only act on a single message at a time, and after about 1000 messages Gmail would block my access for a few hours.

Gmail, being in perpetual beta, has been adding features quietly for quite some time now. Many of the features “fix” issues that seemed to have been design decisions early on, some of which were maddening (like the missing delete button_).

At any rate, I was cleaning out my inbox this morning, and just stumbled across the new “select everything” feature. I was doing a search on cleaning up a bunch of computer-generated e-mails in a label, and noticed that clicking on “select all” now yielded the following:

All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all coversations that match this search

I did, and I clicked “Delete”. I was asked if I was sure. I clicked “Yes”. Mission accomplished.

So, kudos to you, Google. This feature is a late—but still welcome—addition.