Earlier I had written about how Gmail needed some way (before leaving beta) to mass delete messages in the spam bin because at that time the only way was 100 at a time (I erroneously mentioned it as 50 at a time, but there is a way to increase it to 100 at a time and have since been corrected [thanks Mike and Matt]). I even contributed this to Techdirt and Mike ran it along with some insightful thoughts of his own. I agree with him, BTW, that this isn’t something to get “super angry” about, and personally I have never been angry at all actually, just trying to be helpful to the Gmail beta team about making sure they added this mass deletion of spam feature before the product left beta. Also, to provide some level of reality to those users like myself who get a lot of email.

Good news! Over the weekend I noticed the addition of a new feature (well, a Warning: message in bold RED anyway) that promised to auto delete email in the “spam” bin after 30 days. Note the screenshot below taken on Saturday 9/11:



This shows that unfortunately this process has actually not started taking place (see update below), because there is still 207,203 emails in the “spam” bin that are older than 30 days. At least this is the case in my overburdened Gmail spam bin, anyway. So I wonder when this feature will actually be activated? The message is great, and gives me hope, but does anybody know when they are going to flip the switch and turn that trash compactor on? No, I haven’t had time to check into this in more detail but I’m hoping one of our readers might have done so. It will be a cool day when I login to Gmail and those emails are magically — poof — gone.

BTW, just want to thank the readers who commented on my prior entry, offering third party programming solutions (Jim Dabell suggested using a Python script) and/or those who sent the Gmail team a note encouraging them to add some sort of mass delete function. I suspected that there would be 3rd party alternatives to this issue, but I was really hoping that the Gmail team would address this before leaving beta. It appears now that they have … sort of. Just throw the switch.

Update: I noticed today 9/13/04, just as I was publishing this entry that my new Gmail spam bin message count is 205,803 (a reduction of 1000+ emails) … so some of those emails have been devoured by the Gmail system. Perhaps it is set to slowly devour the messages older than 30 days in the spam bin?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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