Comments on: How to Delete Emails from Gmail IMAP Access Mail Client

By: Alyce Nivala

Alyce Nivala — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:29:16 +0000

Hello Guru, what entice you to post an article. This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last week.

By: kk

kk — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:41:04 +0000

I second Jim. I have way too many labels to make a search.

By: Jim Sowers

Jim Sowers — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:41:19 +0000

@kk Yes, that helps, but I use a LOT of labels. So it makes for a very LONG Boolean statement. IT would be nice if they had an operator that allowed you just to identify items without labels.

Thanks. Jim

By: soydeedo

soydeedo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:22:43 +0000

kk, yes there is a way to see only archived items (i.e. only items without any tags at all). To do this, search for “-label:inbox AND -label:test” where test would be an extra label you have aside from inbox. If you have multiple labels you need to filter out just add more AND statements like this: “-label:inbox AND -label:test AND -label:test2 AND -label:test3 AND -label:test4″ etc.

The – tells Gmail to search for items without the label “inbox” and also without the other labels. That only leaves label-less items which are what we’re looking for. =)

Hope this helps.

By: kk

kk — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:18:11 +0000

is there a way to see all mails that have no labels to them because of deleting from IMAP client?

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:14:38 +0000

The behavior you describe seems to have changed. I remember using this some months back and when I deleted a message on the handheld, it was “Archived” in Gmail; that is, it was in “All mail” but not in Inbox or Trash.
I stopped using this for a while and now I’m back and when I delete a message on the handheld, it goes into my Gmail Trash. This is actually NOT what I want since I like Gmail’s Archive feature. I will just get used to not deleting anything on my handheld and hope that when it zaps messages over x days old it won’t auto-trash them on Gmail.

By: Jim Sowers

Jim Sowers — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:09:04 +0000

Note also that “moving” email from one “All Mail” GMail account to another also does NOT delete from the source folder. I signed up for Google Apps Premier — so I had to move my email from my existing GMail account. I learned the details you described above. I also came to realize that if I wanted to safely delete email from my old GMail account, it would be very handy to:
1. have the ability to list emails that had one and only one label. That way, if I wanted to delete them, I could do so without deleting emails that had other labels, AND

2. to be able to list only those emails that had NO labels. Thus, once I had copied all of the emails based on their labels to preserve that structure, I wanted to capture the remaining email by copying “All Mail” — except, it would be much faster to be able to exclude all of the labeled emails.

Maybe you could expand on your article as these questions will become more common.

Best,

Jim