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I have a couple thousand e-mails in my Gmail inbox which I want to move to a folder called "oldmail".

I can select the checkbox button and then "All" and move but it only selects and moves those that are showing (about 40).

How can I select and move all mails from my inbox to the folder "oldmail"?

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

To apply the oldmail label to all the messages in your inbox

  1. Click "all".
  2. You should then see "All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 139 conversations in Inbox" between the buttons and the first email.
  3. Click the second part of the phrase.
  4. Use the label button to assign the label or to create the label
  5. Click the Archive button.
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didn't see that at first, thanks! –  Edward Tanguay Aug 8 '12 at 3:41
I don't see any such message as mentioned in point 2. I did a long time ago, but not any longer. –  Klas Mellbourn Jun 25 at 17:12
I cannot see such a message now. I think Google have made changes to GMail! –  fatuhoku Jul 2 at 14:58
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As of the time of writing, following mhoran_psprep's answer will not do because Gmail will no longer prompt you for the option of selecting all your mail.

The good news is, you can still work around it. The key is to use a custom search string such as in:inbox is:read which then brings up the prompt again. You can modify it for your needs to catch more than just read mails.

I found this solution on wikiHow.

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@mhoran_psprep's answer actually is still valid, with one caveat

Fancy New Inbox is broken

If you're using the fancy new inbox (which they will probably have defaulted you to) you need to disable it. This is what I mean by 'fancy new inbox' where it separates groups of items :

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Disable fancy new inbox

  • Go to Settings > Inbox
  • Don't go to Configure inbox because that's different
  • Change the inbox to Default
  • Save changes

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Move to inbox

You can now go back to the steps in @mhoran_psprep's answer and you should see this

enter image description here

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