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. ^[1]

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 ^[1] 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.