Gmail is fantastic for mailing list subscriptions– subscribe to your favorite lists, filter them with labels, and you can both participate at your leisure and have a ready, personal archive when you need one that groups the vast majority of conversations properly.
Until now, the only thing that has been missing in this scenario is the ability to mark all unread messages in a label as being read. For instance, my PHP-Lists folder has more than 10,000 unread messages. The only way to mark past messages read was screen by screen– which takes a while even at 100 messages per clip.
No longer… now when you “select all” while viewing a label’s contents you will get a second option to select all conversation in the folder:
The last piece of the puzzle is in place.
pretty cool; now if i would just remember to use my gmail account!
Hey Chris - I actually shouted with joy when I discovered this a few days ago… I’d long ago given up on trying to manipulate certain messages given the previous, utterly maddening 20-conversations-per-screen default. Always nice when a free service gets even better.
P.S. I’m posting this utterly inane comment from IE instead of FireFox - where I just installed the cocomment plugin - in part just to see if my comment will actually show up here, as an earlier comment submitted from within Firefox has not (though it *does* show up in my tracked convos @ cocomment - huh?). If this results in multiple comment posts from me (on your cocommenting article) - e.g., if you have comment moderation in place, and somehow that wasn’t evident earlier - please don’t hesitate to delete them!
It would be nice if there was a “Select All Unread”. I have 40,000 messages in a folder, 800 of which are unread. I’d like to make the 800 read, but I don’t want to do it a page at a time. If I select all 40,000, it takes a while for the process of marking them all read to complete.
Mike– that’s exactly what this trick let’s you do. If the messages are in folder X, use a search for label:X is:unread *, then you will get the option (after the search) to expand the search beyond the current screen. when you do it will select just the unread messages… then you can mark them read. That’s exactly the need I had as well.
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