Help! I Have Too Many Emails In My Inbox!
We all like a clutter-free email inbox where we can easily locate the messages and attachments we need. However, it’s often hard to maintain a clean Gmail inbox given the high volume of emails we receive each and every day.
There are many useful Gmail tips you can apply to maintain an organized mailbox, but most of them require you to stay on top of your emails each day. When things get out of hand, it may be time to resort to drastic measures, like moving or deleting hundreds of emails at once. Once you learn how to select all messages in Gmail, you can easily delete, archive, or move them to clean out the clutter.
How To Select All Emails In Gmail
If you want to manage your emails in bulk, then you must first learn how to select them in your Gmail account. You can do this by choosing all messages through webmail or selecting all emails in the Gmail app.
How To Select All In Gmail On Web
- Navigate to your inbox by going to https://mail.google.com/.
- Click the Select checkbox in the upper left of your inbox (directly under the search bar).
- Now, above your messages in the inbox, you will see a message stating, “All … messages on this page are selected.”
- To choose all messages, click the words, “Select all … messages in Inbox” to check every message in the inbox.
Once all emails are checked, you can choose to perform an action (delete, archive, move, mark all read, label).
If you aren’t sure what to do with the messages, it may help to learn the best way to organize Gmail.
Select All In Gmail App
Unfortunately, if you want to know how to select all in Gmail app on Android or iPhone, you’re a bit out of luck. The app doesn’t support this feature, meaning you must instead revert to using Gmail on the web.
If you are an iPhone user, there is another workaround that will let you select all emails in Gmail app, but it involves using your Mail app. Here’s how:
- Open the Mail app from your iPhone.
- If you haven’t already added your Gmail account to Mail, you will need to go to Settings → Mail and tap Accounts → Add Account to login to your Gmail.
- Once set up, choose your Gmail inbox from the mailbox list when you open the Mail app.
- Click Edit in the top right of your screen. Tap Select All.
How To Select All Unread Emails In Gmail
It is easy to select all emails in Gmail. However, selecting just unread messages takes a bit more work. There are two methods you can use to choose all unread emails, each of which is outlined below.
Selecting All Unread for the First Page:
- Open your inbox.
- Locate the Select checkbox in the upper left of your inbox (directly under the search bar).
- Click the down arrow to the right of the checkbox.
- From the drop-down menu, choose Unread.
- This will check all unread emails from the first page of your inbox.
Selecting All Unread Using Search:
- Open your mailbox.
- Locate the Search Bar at the top of the page.
- Use the Gmail search operator 'is:unread' to perform a search for all unread messages.
- Now, the search result will include all unread emails from anywhere in your inbox.
- Click the Select checkbox in the upper left of your inbox (directly under the search bar).
- Now, above your messages in the inbox, you will see a message stating, “All … conversations on this page are selected.”
- To choose all unread messages, click the words, “Select all conversations that match this search.”
How To Select All Emails From One Sender In Gmail
Gmail also provides multiple options for those who want to choose all emails from a single sender. Below you’ll find directions for both methods.
Selecting All Messages by Locating Single Message:
- Open your Gmail inbox.
- Locate one email from the sender you want to mark all messages from.
- Right-click on the message from your inbox.
- From the options, choose “Find emails from…”
- Gmail will now display all messages from this sender.
- Click the Select checkbox in the upper left of your inbox (directly under the search bar). This will check all messages displayed on the first page.
- To choose all messages from this sender, click the words, “Select all conversations that match this search.”
Selecting All Messages from Sender by Using Search:
- Open your mailbox.
- Locate the Search Bar at the top of the page.
- Use the Gmail search operator from: and add the email address after the colon. This will search for all messages from that sender’s address.
- Click the Select checkbox in the upper left of your inbox (directly under the search bar). This will highlight all emails displayed on the first page.
- To mark all letters from this sender, click the option, “Select all conversations that match this search.”
How To Select Multiple Emails In Gmail
- Open your mail account.
- Click the checkbox next to any message to select it.
- Continue clicking checkboxes next to the messages you wish to be selected.
💡 Note: If you want to select messages all in a row, you can use Shift + Click to check all messages in that range.
Not using Gmail? You can also learn how to select multiple emails in Outlook.
Manage Your Messages Effectively With Clean Email
As you can tell, Gmail provides users with multiple options to help them highlight messages. However, it’s also easy to select all emails in Gmail and quickly apply actions within the Clean Email app.
To select all emails using the Clean Email app, simply:
- Launch the app or sign in here.
- Choose All Mail from the left-side panel.
- Click on Select button which is located under the search bar. Then click Select All.
- Now, choose any action from the action panel that you want to apply to these messages.
💡 Note: If you want to instead only choose all messages in a certain folder (Inbox, Trash, etc.), you can simply choose the corresponding location instead of All Mail on the left-side panel.
Although the ability to select all emails in Gmail is handy, it isn’t nearly everything Clean Email has to offer. In fact, this inbox management tool makes it easy to manage email overload and achieve Gmail inbox zero.
For example, Smart Folders feature sorts messages for you based on criteria they share, like “social notifications” or “productivity tools.” With this feature, you can choose any Smart Folder and quickly perform actions on all selected messages in that folder. This makes it much easier to clean out the clutter without setting up complex rules and filters within the Gmail app.
Similarly, the Auto Clean feature lets you automate any email task you’d like. So, instead of deleting all those messages from online retailers every Friday, you can program Auto Clean to do that task for you. Similarly, you can program Auto Clean to apply labels, move messages into folders, and more.
In all, Clean Email offers over a dozen features that will help make mailbox management easier and less time-consuming for you. Because of the app’s security and privacy focus, you never have to worry about what’s happening with your data, and since it works with all IMAP-based email providers, you can use Clean Email with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or most other applications you can think of.
Wondering to get more tips and tricks? Check out our guides on how to find old emails in Gmail and how to find unread messages in Gmail.
How to select all in Gmail - FAQs
Is there a way to mass select emails in Gmail?
Figuring out how to select all in Gmail isn’t terribly hard. From the inbox, you can use the Select checkbox to mark all messages on the current page, then click “Select all conversations” to mark the rest.
Can you select all in Gmail app?
Unfortunately, Gmail’s mobile app currently doesn’t support the Select All feature, but there are some workarounds if you need to do it.
How do I select email in Gmail?
You can highlight a single message or any number of messages in Gmail by using the select checkboxes next to each message. If you need to select all in Gmail app to delete, you can use the checkbox at the top of the inbox to choose all first, then apply the delete action.
