How to Hide or Remove Gmail Spam Counter
Gmail has an effective if not the best spam filter for free web based email services. So if you are receiving tons of spam bulk mail messages, Gmail will send most of them to spam folder (label as spam) with low false positive rate, and making the spam count number increasingly running up if you don’t clear and delete the spam identified as spam occasionally. The number of spam email counter, which appears next to the Spam folder or label to indicate to users how many new unread spam or bulk messages that been caught that hasn’t been read, can run into thousands or even tens of thousand.
For users who never and will not check for any legitimate or valid emails among spam messages, or don’t want to see the spam counter with big number, here’s the trick to hide the spam count and make the spam counter at the left sidebar menu disappear.
Create a new filter in Gmail webmail interface by clicking on Create a filter link. Then fill in is:spam in “Has the words:” field. Then click on Next >> button.
If you receive a warning saying filters searches containing “label:”, “in:” or “is:” criteria are not recommended, as these criteria will never match incoming mail, click on OK button to to continue to next step.
In the Options page, tick the Delete it check box, and also check the Also apply filter to xx conversations below.
All current existing and future spam messages will be moved to Trash, and the Spam folder/label will never contain any spam emails, and thus there won’t be any spam count or number of spam appears on the label. If you need to check for any false positives on spam, you will have to go to Trash instead of Spam.
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Nice but I have another possible option:
When is: spam
Action: Mark as read
Just perform most of the steps mentioned above, except for deleting the message in the spam folder upon entering. Just marking them as being read will be enough to do the trick.
The spam messages will still be in the spam folder for 30 days, so any false positives can still be rescued. The mail folder list will show there are no unread messages in the spam folder, and that is exactly what you wanted.
Thanks for the procedure.
Thanks for the great trick. Worked like a charm.
[...] weniger wirkungsvoll, aber dennoch letztlich die von Meier favorisierte. Sie besteht darin, dass eine Filterdefinition den Spam-Ordner immer sofort leert, wenn eine Mail hinein verschoben wird. Auf diese Weise zählt natürlich der Spamcount nicht hoch [...]
[...] great, but if you’re constantly annoyed at the spam count shown on the sidebar, this article will show you how to constantly purge it. I edited it just a bit, setting the [...]
[...] How to Hide or Remove Spam (&Spam Count) in Gmail [...]
Neat trick. I was about to write a Greasemonkey script to hide the spam count, but this should work perfectly. Thanks!
Thanks. Just what I was looking for.
Most helpful!