Matt Cutts (who works for the Search Quality group in Google) has a great idea for starting the New Year.
Start with a fresh and empty inbox in your Gmail.
There’s nothing like an empty inbox to motivate you and give you a fresh start for the year.
But Matt,” you say, “my inbox is my to-do list!” So here’s how to do it without losing that to-do list. Add a label like “oldinbox” to everything currently in your inbox and then archive all the email in your inbox.
Presto! Your inbox is clean and empty, but you can still visit the “oldinbox” label when you’re ready to whittle down those older emails. I know it sounds scary, but there’s only two simple steps, and both can be undone.
Step 1:
Add a label to all the email in your inbox. Click on “Inbox” at the top left of your Gmail. Then look for “Select: All” and click on the “All” link.If your inbox is bigger than one screenful, you’ll see a message like “All 25 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 665 conversations in Inbox.” Click on the second sentence of that message to select everything in your inbox. Now click on the “More Actions” button and select “New label…”. You’ll be prompted for a label name, so enter something like oldinbox as the label name and click OK. Gmail will ask if you’re sure you want to apply this label to all the selected emails, so say yes by clicking that OK button.
Congrats! Everything in your inbox now has the label “oldinbox”. Now we just need to archive every email with that label.
Step 2:
Archive all your email with that label. Look for the “Labels” box on the left-hand side of the screen, and click on “oldinbox” (or whatever label name you gave). Click Select: All. Do the trick to select all conversations if you need to. Then just click the “Archive” button. That’s it.Your inbox is now empty, but you can get to those older emails if you need to by clicking “oldinbox” in the Labels box.
Can you undo these changes? Yes! Read more.
Photo by Google.