Gmail: emptying your inbox

The below is all stupid — all I have to do is use the ‘Move to’ button, which is a folder with an arrow to the right.

What I’ve done is go to Gmail settings and change ‘Button labels’ to ‘Text’ so they are not so opaque. I just don’t find their icons useful a lot of the time.

I kind of understand why gmail uses labels — it lets you classify a message as relevant to more than one topic. But because gmail leaves the ‘inbox’ label on everything, the inbox just fills up, even with stuff you’ve labelled and which in a more conventional (and for me intuitive) program would now be in a different folder.

Let’s say I want to find messages in in my inbox, give them all a label and remove the inbox label from them all.

First of all, I have to use standard view because (presumably in an attempt to drive people away fro the basic HTML view), there is no ‘select all’ button in the basic view. Broken by design or what!?

So

1. Do the search
2. Select all
3. Remove any not required
4. Choose the label icon (sort of luggage tag shape) and either allocate them to an existing label or create a new one; they will now be labelled with the new label and inbox
5. The hit the archive button (a book with a down arrow on it  — who would guess?) — this  strips off the inbox label (who would guess?)

It’s far from intuitive, at least for old-fashioned me, but it seems to work.

fl