How to Select All Emails in Gmail
If you want to move, delete, or change the status of your Gmail emails, you’ll need to select them first. Here’s how.
With an easy-to-use interface on desktop and mobile, plenty of free storage space, and tight integration with other Google products, it’s not hard to see why Gmail is the one of the most popular email services in the world.
Of course, keeping on top of your unread emails can sometimes feel like a full-time job. If you’ve had your Gmail account for some time, you may have a lot of emails that you don’t really need.
Thankfully, Gmail makes it pretty easy to select all of your emails at once. From there, you can hide, set to read, or delete them. To select all of your emails in Gmail, here’s what you’ll need to do.
How to Select All Emails in Gmail
Currently, the only way that you can select all emails easily is by using Gmail on the web. You can select multiple messages on mobile or tablet, but you need to tap each one. This isn’t much use if you want to select thousands of messages.
To start, open the Gmail website and sign in to your account.
Navigate to the emails that you want to select from, then click the Select checkbox at the top of your list.
This will select all the emails on the current page.
At the top of the page, you will see a banner informing you how many conversations are selected. Click Select all conversations to select the emails in your inbox or folder.
This will select all of your emails. You can then move, delete, or set the status to read for the emails you’ve selected.
How to Select Emails Based on Status
If you don’t want to select all of your emails, but instead want to only select your unread messages, you can choose to select the emails by their status.
You can select emails by clicking the down arrow next to the Select checkbox.
From the drop-down menu, you can select options including starred and unread emails.
This method will only select messages on the first page, however, and there’s no option to select all conversations. If you have a large number of these messages, then you need to use the search bar instead.
To search for unread messages, for example, type is:unread into the search bar.
This will bring up all unread emails in your Gmail account. Once you’ve made the search, click the Select checkbox.
Finally, click Select all conversations that match this search to select all of your unread emails.
You can search for a range of types of messages in this way. Queries such as is:read, is:starred, is:sent, and is:snoozed can all be combined to narrow down your search.
What You Can Do With the Selected Emails
Once you have your emails selected, there are a number of actions you can take. These include:
- Archive: this removes the email from your Inbox. You can retrieve it again by clicking the All mail tab.
- Report spam: marks all selected emails as spam, moving them to your spam folder.
- Delete: deletes the selected emails, sending them to your Trash folder. These will be deleted automatically after 30 days.
- Mark as unread: turns any read emails to unread status.
- Snooze: this allows you to snooze your emails. You can set a time for the messages to reappear in your inbox as if it was a new message.
- Add to task: this adds the email as a task in Google Tasks.
- Move to: this allows you to move your messages to a different folder
- Label: this adds labels to your email messages, such as Work, Social, and Later.
There are also further options available to you by clicking the three dots menu icon.
These include mark as read, mark as important, mark as not important, add star, filter messages like these, mute, and forward as attachment.
Take Control of Your Gmail Account
Gmail is an incredibly useful tool (and free) tool for managing your important messages. The more you know about the features of Gmail, the more useful it becomes.
If you want to block annoying or harmful emails, you could learn how to block someone in Gmail to stop them. If you’re busy, you could schedule your messages in advance to send whenever you want them to. You can even integrate third-party apps to take Gmail to add even more new features.
