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The "All Mail" box in Gmail.

M

MegaMillions

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 1, 2009
243
0
So, I just realized that there are nearly 100,000 emails in my "all mail" gmail box, mostly due to the amount of junk that comes into my junk box. I get a couple hundred junk a day.

Apparently when I delete all those junk emails, they don't get deleted from "all mail." However, All mail also contains all the emails that I want to keep. If I just delete everything in All Mail, will it delete it all from everywhere?

How do I get rid of just the 95,000 junk emails, without erasing the 5,000 good emails? Does the All Mail box affect the inbox and my other mailboxes?
 
All Mail is just every email your received with no filters applied. So, if you select all and delete you will delete all your emails junk or otherwise.

Emails in your spam folder should not appear in your all mail folder. If you delete an email it should no longer appear in your all mail folder.

The only way I could think of getting rid of them is individually, or you could try making filters to find the junk email and then delete all the email under a particular filter.
 
All Mail contains every mail you have sent or received EXCEPT for mail that ends up in your spam folder, that does not show up in All Mail.
 
swiftaw said:
All Mail contains every mail you have sent or received EXCEPT for mail that ends up in your spam folder, that does not show up in All Mail.
Click to expand...

Well, all the mail that has ever shown up in my spam folder, is in my All Mail folder.
 
How do you access Gmail? Over the web or through an email client? Messages in Gmail's "Trash" and "Spam" folder do not appear in "All Mail". They are also automatically deleted after 30 days.

If you are using a mail client, then it is probably set up incorrectly for Gmail. You should map the client's trash and junk functions to the appropriate Gmail folder located underneath the "All Mail" folder. They are probably just mapped to labels.
 
BaldiMac said:
How do you access Gmail? Over the web or through an email client? Messages in Gmail's "Trash" and "Spam" folder do not appear in "All Mail". They are also automatically deleted after 30 days.

If you are using a mail client, then it is probably set up incorrectly for Gmail. You should map the client's trash and junk functions to the appropriate Gmail folder located underneath the "All Mail" folder. They are probably just mapped to labels.
Click to expand...

If I look at the mail at gmail.com, all the 95,000 junk emails are still in the All Mail box. It's not just in mail.app.

Do you think that having it incorrectly set up and syncing with the server could have caused it to make the server put all those messages in All Mail? Even if I fix it now, I have these 95,000 junk emails to get rid of somehow.

edit: I don't know how this happened, but what i'm gonna do is this. I deleted the account from mail.app, just to clear that out of the way for now. Then, on gmail.com, i'm gonna go into the inbox, the sent box, and every mailbox I want to keep the messages of, and i'll mark everything as unread.

Then i'll go through the All Mail box, clicking "Select: Read messages" and just delete everything. Everything unread will remain!
 
I'm down to 80,000 in the All Mail box.

Is there any way to see more than 50 messages at a time?
 
itommyboy said:
From GMail web gui:
* Settings
* General
* Maximum Page Size

Allows you to bump up to 100 (or down to 25) "conversations" per page.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Down to 70,000.....

I don't think anyone has ever dealt with a pile of junk email this large before, ever.
 
Okay so, all the junk emails are gone! *whew*

Now what? I'm gonna add the account back into Mail.app, and how do I ensure that this won't happen again?

I think what I did last time is I took the "spam" box in mail.app, and did "use this mailbox for Junk" so the Spam box disappeared, and any spam came into the mail.app junk box. Isn't that what you're supposed to do?
 
MegaMillions said:
Okay so, all the junk emails are gone! *whew*

Now what? I'm gonna add the account back into Mail.app, and how do I ensure that this won't happen again?

I think what I did last time is I took the "spam" box in mail.app, and did "use this mailbox for Junk" so the Spam box disappeared, and any spam came into the mail.app junk box. Isn't that what you're supposed to do?
Click to expand...

I'd let gmail handle junk and not try to configure it with mail.app. Gmail should just be putting in straight into the spam folder.
 
zrbecker said:
I'd let gmail handle junk and not try to configure it with mail.app. Gmail should just be putting in straight into the spam folder.
Click to expand...

It does.. but what I wanted to do is use mail.apps mailboxes... that's what the "use this mailbox for Junk" "use this mailbox for Sent" commands are for.

Like, when I put the gmail account in mail.app, there will be a whole set of blank looking folders called "sent" "drafts" "trash" and "junk" in addition to the ones with the fancy icons in mail.app. I thought the point was to have the gmail account use the mail.app boxes for those functions so that there aren't two sets of mailboxes.
 
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