Mark All Unread Messages as Read in Gmail [How To]
Over a period of time you may have tons of unread emails in your Gmail Inbox, most of these emails may be months or years old and navigating to each of these messages and marking them as read can be time consuming.
Here are three simple steps in which you can mark all the mails in Gmail as read without having to visit each and every individual mail.
Also See: Searching for emails received in particular time frames.
Step 1: Search for Mails Which are Unread
The unread emails in Gmail are marked with the unreadlabel, so a basic search for label:unreadshould display all the emails which are unread, you can also use this trick in combination with searching emails within particular time frames to only view unread emails that were received between certain dates.
Step 2: Select All the Emails in the Search Results
Once the search result is displayed, click on the select All link to select the messages on the page.
Once you have clicked on the all link messages on the current page will be selected, if there are more than one pages with unread mails, you will see a additional message asking you to select all the messages that match this search, click on the link.
Clicking on this link should select all the unread messages.
Step 3: Mark all Messages as Read
Once you have selected all the messages, you can mark them as read by selecting the option from More Actions drop down list.
Selecting the mark as read option will show you a JavaScript alert since the actions span multiple pages, simple click on Ok to continue.
That’s it, your unread message count should drop to zero with this trick, rinse and repeat whenever your message count goes out of bounds.
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Author: Keith Dsouza
I am the editor-in-chief and owner of Techie Buzz. I love coding and have contributed to several open source projects in the past. You can know more about me and my projects by visiting my Personal Website.I am also a social networking enthusiast and can be found active on twitter, you can follow Keith on twitter @keithdsouza. You can click on my name to visit my Google+ profile.Keith Dsouza has written 4449 articles for us.
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Nice, didn’t knew about the label search .
@madhur Glad you found it useful.
Thanks.
I’ve been using the label: search for quite sometime now, its invaluable. IIRC, the “select all conversations that match this filter” is a new feature, I don’t recall this being available earlier, noted this while clearing up my Inbox
Hi, Keith:
helped me, especially since the Gmail Notifier that I'd just added, scared me with the '7777 unread mails' message !!
Thanks!
Thank you so much. I had 3400 unread emails and your method for changing them to read worked Perfectly! Great website awesome, great, will recommend to a friend.
It can even be easier
- open gmail on the folder you want to mark as read
- select all (same button as in the guide)
- then there comes a message
"All x conversations on this page are selected. Select all xxxx conversations in Inbox"()
-> click on the select all and boom you got everything without the technical label:unread part :)
-> more actions -> mark as read
For all msg's no matter which folder you can also simply search for nothing specific, just press the search button
Excellent! Thank you! I have been wanting to mark the 2k + emails as read for a long time now. This was a great help!
Thx a lot for the tip! :)
Your tip helped me allot.
Though there is a slight difference because gmail changed the layout a bit.
That is the solution I was looking for! For some unknown reason Gmail marked thousands of old messages as unread, earlier this month, and I was anticipating having to go through them folder by folder, page by page. Thanks!
Thank you, that got it done.
Thankx. Easiest way to mark all unread mail as read in one go.
I never noticed ‘Select all conversations that match this search’ before reading this.
Thanks alot Keith…..i was even preprared to pay somebody 50 bucks to read all of them for me!!!!! thanks again