How to Bulk Select in Gmail
Have you ever wanted to perform an action on a large number of Emails in your Gmail Inbox all at once? Learn how!
I was recently asked to help someone using Gmail who wanted to select thousands of Emails in their Inbox and move them to their Archive.
In Gmail, you can only “Select” one screen of Emails at a time. And by default, Gmail only displays 25 “Conversations” on each screen as shown below:
Once you select your screen of Email conversations, you can then perform “actions” on them, such as moving them to your “Archive” (which is what this person wanted to do), “Deleting” them permanently, or “Moving” them to another folder.
But since they had thousands of Emails they wanted to select in order to Archive, this would have taken a lot of time!
After a bit of research, I came up with two solutions that would allow them to select more than 25 Emails at once.
Increase the Default Page Size from 25 to 50 or even 100 Conversations
With a few quick steps, you can increase the number of “Conversations” that are displayed in Gmail to 50 or either 100.
1) Select Gmail “Settings” (the “Gear” Icon in the upper right corner, then select “Settings”).
2) In the “General” tab, under “Maximum Page Size”, you will see that “25” is usually set at the default number of visible conversations.
3) Instead, select “50” or better yet “100” as your new “Conversations per page” limit
4) Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom and select “Save Changes”!
5) Now, your Gmail Inbox will display up to 100 Email Conversations per screen and you can “Select All” to select all 100 of them at once!
This is definitely a big improvement over the 25 Conversation limit, but for someone with thousands of Emails, this may still take a long time to work through screens of 100 Emails.
Luckily, I found a better (and even easier) solution!
Use the “Select All Conversations in Inbox” feature
1) Whenever you “Select All” the conversations in your Gmail Inbox, Gmail will display a message up in the top of the screen in blue text that says “Select all nn conversations in the Inbox”, as shown below:
2) “Click” on this blue text and the message at the top of your Inbox will now say “All nn conversations in the Inbox are selected. Clear Selection”, as shown below:
3) Gmail has now selected ALL the Email Conversations in your Inbox, and you can now perform an action such as Archiving all of them with a single click!
4) If you change your mind after Selecting all of them, you can always just choose “Clear Selection” in blue text at the top of your Inbox.
So there you have it - two ways to perform actions on a large number of Email Conversations in your Inbox.