Despite taking basic care to avoid SPAM, I still end up receiving much. Some of that is not SPAM per se but regular newsletters, forum notifications etc. I read those but if not actively deleted, they tend to pile up.
One way of deleting such piled up mail is to search using wildcards or labels. But managing multiple labels or wildcards becomes pain after a while. My solution? read below. This is specific to GMail accounts but can be used for others
- Open a mail that you frequently receive. From the "More options" select "Filter messages like these".
- You will be shown messages that are similar to the mail you started with. Gmail automatically locates similar mails based on sender or mailing lister headers inside mails. You will need to create a good criteria that nabs lots of unwanted mails together. Some mails have common title or part of title that you can filter. Some come from same sender. Some senders use different usernames but same domain name to send mails. If you find such trend, you can filter the domain directly. You can try to update search criteria and click on "Test Search" to see how many mails get fitered. Once done, click "Next Step"
- Create new filter from the "Apply the label". Once you create this label, subsequently use same label for filtering.
- Also check "Never mark as important" and "Also apply filter to n conversations below"
- Its done. Now all mails will keep aggregating under the label that you created. When you are in clean up mode, just click the label from left. Select all mails and delete!
