Habitually Good

If you use Gmail then you must have noticed that sheer number of Spam email that Gmail filters out for you. It is particularly good at doing this. However, all this spam ends up as unread email in the Spam folder.

And I don’t know about you but at least when I log in to Gmail and I see this count of unread email beside the Spam folder, it bothers me a lot. There was a time when I used to simply go there and delete these emails every day just so I don’t see that number.

It turns out that there is a better way to solve the problem. We use Gmail filters to solve it. Here’s how:

Step 1: Create a filter – you can click on the Create A Filter link next to the search box on the top of the Gmail UI:

Step 2: Add a search criteria – type “in:spam” in the “Choose Search Criteria” step under “Has the words” and click next:

When you click Next, you are shown a warning which says this will not work. For some reason, it works despite the warning, so just ignore it and click OK to continue.

Step 3: Choose Action – this is where you can choose to do what you want with the Spam. Initially I chose to delete the Spam (though I recommend against it, because there can be real mail which can be marked as Spam by mistake).  Later on I changed that to “Mark as read”. You can choose whatever you want:

Notice the check box next to the “Create Filter” button. You can choose to apply the filter to the existing messages in your Gmail account. So, if you choose to “Mark as read” then it will also mark as read all the unread mail in the Spam folder. After you click the “Create Filter” button, you are done. Enjoy.

Thanks to the Geek for the tip.

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