Gmail Purging

[trunolimit]

Hello Forum,

My Gmail has become completely unmanageable. I've got over 3,000 unread emails. I'd like to completely delete all my emails except for a couple.

What is the easiest way to do this through the web? I can only display 100 emails at a time and I don't feel like clicking through 30+ pages of emails. I was thinking maybe there is a fancy filter I can use to trash all emails except a couple with special labels.

I'd like to avoid installing an email client but if it's the only way, which client is the most awsomest?

[xcorvis]

First, don't delete. Just archive your mail. Delete junk like mailing lists if you must, but unless you're out of space there's no good reason to delete when you can just archive mail. You just got an additional 2.5 GB from Google last week.

To select everything: Go to All Mail (left side). Select the messages using the very top "select all" checkbox. Then you'll see a little note just under that menu bar that says something like "All XX conversations are selected. Click here to select all XXXXXXX messages". Click that. Then click archive.

Once your inbox is empty you can start from scratch. Read messages then archive them. Get religious about it.

Lifehacker has a lot of good email organization tips.