Using Up Gmail's Lifetime Supply Of Space... And Looking For The Delete Key

from the and-then-how-do-you-delete dept

TDavid writes "The Gmail team has confirmed that there is currently no feature to deal with mass deletion of mail and they do not indicate when or if they will add this functionality. The current choices are either deal with deleting forever mail 50 threads at a time or using a third party script. Not a problem for those who receive 30 emails a day, but a huge issue for those who receive thousands of emails a day, with the vast majority being spam." Funny. I had been wondering the same thing, as I've been messing around with forwarding spam to my Gmail account over the last month (now pushing about 20% capacity, so a bit slower than the example above). One change, though, is that you can set the email box to show 100 threads at a time, rather than 50, which should speed up the delete process slightly. Still, you have to admit that Gmail is a beta product, and it's quite likely they'll add a "delete all spam" feature at some point. Either that, or add an option (found on many other systems) that will automatically delete mail designated as spam after a specific time period (1 week? 1 month?). I'm not sure it does much good to get super angry about a beta email product that clearly tells you you're running out of room, and then... runs out of room. A related question, though, concerns how good the Gmail spam filter actually is. In my tests, it's pretty bad. It appears to catch about 70% of spam, which is much lower than most anti-spam solutions. Of course, with such a low rate, you would figure that there wouldn't be too many false positives, but that's not true either. It tends to catch plenty of legitimate email and tag it as spam. Another thing they will hopefully fix before the system comes out of beta.

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