For quite some time now, I have struggled to come to terms with the inability to do your regular sort on emails in my gmail inbox. Yes, I have heard of and read tomes about labels and filters and other nifty ways of fixing the sort problem but I still would love to have the ability to do the simple stuff. Take the process like this one about dealing with items in the spam folder for example:
Set up Filters to automate labelling of your mails, (say) as per sender or
sender group. Click the check-box to apply the filter on all messages.
Apply/save the Filter. Now, open each Label, Select: All, click ‘Select all #### messages in this
label, and click Archive. This would remove all labelled conversations from
Inbox. Return to Inbox. If any unlabelled messages are present, apply one of the
following actions — (a) delete (b) mark as spam (c) label and archive (d) if
necessary, star (for later follow-up). Now you should have an empty Inbox. Go to Spam. Select: All, click ‘Not spam’. All spam messages would move to
Inbox. Go to Settings > Filters. Edit and re-apply each filter. Return to Inbox. Select: All, mark as spam. Go to Spam. Click ‘Delete all messages in Spam’. Go to Trash. Click ‘Delete all messages in Trash’.
Now take a look at that process again and tell me how many steps were involved in just getting rid of unwanted emails. How about I
- click on “subject”, “sender”, or “date” headings and
- have easy access to emails sorted by subject, sender or date and delete or save accordingly?
Sometimes in an effort to be different, we make things unnecessarily complicated. I found a quick and efficient solution that worked for me though. I installed Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client which is preconfigured for gmail. You only need to input your username and password and you have a “normal” inbox. I then clean out stuff I do not need and the changes are reflected in my gmail inbox.
