Gmail tip

Like most people I subscribe to a bunch of sites which send me email updates fairly regularly. For example I have several google alerts keyword searches and each one produces a separate email everyday. This is what I like to think of as 'background' mail, I don't NEED to check any of it.

So when I went on holidays for a couple of weeks recently, I had a lot of this 'background mail' built up of say 100 emails there is more than half of it I'm not interested in trawling through. I just want to mark them as read so only the items I really need to pay attention to are marked unread. "Why don't you just ignore them" you say? , leaving unread emails in my inbox would not sit well with me.

But all is not lost with a bit of forethought its easy to quickly mark all those messages as read.
Enter Gmail's filter functionality, you've probably seen it , its the filters tab under the settings menu, so without further ado, the details.

Create a new filter.

In the to: field enter the address from which the emails you wish to ignore orginate from. if you have more than one address you wish to ignore you need to use the OR operator (many useful gmail operators here)

you can also use partial addresses (if for example you wish to capture all emails from a particular domain just use @domainname)

a complete example here:







you can then hit "test search" to see what messages in your Inbox this pattern matches.
once your happy click next for the filter action

Filter Rule
A simple solution is to choose the filter so these messages skip the Inbox ( you can find them under 'All Mail' or by the label if it is given one, the messages are still marked as unread.

This isn't ideal for me; most of the time I do want to see those messages as they arrive in my inbox, so instead of applying this I simply apply a label such as 'Background Mail' (see image)









Cleaning Your Inbox

So now when I return from holidays and I see 100 emails. Instead of manually selecting the individual messages I'm not interested in reading (right now) and choosing the 'mark as read action'

I simply click the 'Background Mail' label from the labels list which shows all messages with that label (and only messages with the label).

I choose 'ALL' from the Select options .
Then in the Action drop down list I click mark as read.





now when I return to my inbox I can see exactly what needs reading!