Bulk actions

When you have a lot of emails to clean up, you can select them and apply a single action to all of them at once. It saves you plenty of clicks during a tidy-up.

How to select several

There are two ways:

Pick them one by one with checkboxes:

• Click the checkbox to the left of each email you want to include

Select a range:

• Click the first email in the range
• Hold Shift and click the last email
• Everything in between is selected at once

Select everything visible:

• Click the checkbox at the top of the list, or use the Ctrl + A shortcut

Select everything in the whole folder:

• After selecting everything visible, you'll see the text "Select all {N} conversations in {folder}" — click it to extend the selection to everything in the folder (not just what's loaded on screen)

The number of selected items shows up as "{N} selected" at the top.

What you can do with selected emails

Once you've selected several emails, an action bar appears at the top with these buttons:

• Move to inbox — brings them back from archive or trash
• Move to trash — delete (soft — can be restored)
• Delete permanently — remove with no recovery (only in Trash)
• Mark as read — all of them get marked as read
• Flag — all of them get flagged (starred)
• Label — apply a label (see Labels)
• Move to folder — pick a folder from the list

After the action, you get a confirmation:

• "{N} moved to trash"
• "{N} marked as read"
• "{N} flagged"
• and so on

Flagged emails and bulk delete

When you delete several emails in one operation, we automatically protect the flagged ones — they're skipped, and you get the message "{N} flagged were skipped".

It's a safety mechanism: if you flag important emails, you won't lose them by accident during a big cleanup.

To really delete the flagged ones too, you have to remove the flag first, or delete them one by one.

Clear the selection

• Click Clear selection in the action bar
• Or press Escape

Tips

• Tidy up your inbox weekly. Select everything older than a week that you don't need and archive or delete it — use date search to find them (see Search your email)
• Combine with filters to auto-tidy incoming email (see Filters and rules)
• Flag the important stuff first — then it's safe from bulk delete