No way to easily clean up archived emails in Gmail

I was setting up Outlook 2010 on my home computer and imported my Gmail account.  I initially just entered the email address and password into the Outlook Account Setup Wizard and, after a minute or so of crunching on it, Outlook configured the account as an IMAP account and brought everything in, including all of my labels as folders.  Very nice, I thought.

Then, I started deleting emails from the Inbox.  In between every email delete was a lengthy delay as Outlook contacted Gmail and did the deed.  After a few emails, it was obvious that that wasn't going to work out too well.

So, I researched the issue and found suggestions to set it up as a POP3 account instead.  Here's a good link with instructions.  After setting it up as POP3, Gmail proceeded to download emails from 2006.  Lots of emails from 2006, and 2007, etc.  It did it in batches, importing 300 to 500 emails at a time, maybe dependent on the size of included attachments.  I quit somewhere in 2008 when it started importing FreeCycle posts and started researching the problem.

It looks like the issue correlated with my use of my Moto Q.  During the time that it was synched with my Gmail account, it was not actually deleting email but was only marking them as read and moving them into archived status on Gmail.  It turns out that there is no way to view only archived emails in Gmail.  All emails show up in your "All Mail" view, and any emails that are still in your inbox or have been assigned a label will show that in front of the email subject..  The only way to narrow the results down is to eliminate any results that include a label, as you'll notice that the messages that have simply been archived have no label at all.  The discussion within this Gmail Forum link help to describe the process.

So, the net result is that, if you have very few labels set up already, you can fairly easily weed out the archived emails and then delete them.  Within your general account settings in Gmail, you can dictate whether you have 25, 50 or 100 messages show up at a time.  This is the maximum number that can be deleted at one time.  Since I currently have 6800+ messages archived, it will take many, many screen refreshes to get through the task!

Daryn
The Computer Cellar



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