I had 2700+ emails in my inbox and most of them were notifications from MySpace or old order confirmations I didn’t care about anymore — bottom line, it was mostly commercial email of some sort that I didn’t really care to keep.

Gmail is great…but deleting emails was a little slow going — granted I’m lazy, and I was just clicking checkboxes one at a time before hitting delete….until something dawned upon me.

Almost all commercial email has to comply with spam laws nowadays. They need to use certain language in their communications that make it easy for people to unsubscribe along with making their privacy policies available and so on.

So I ran some searches.

By and large, the word “privacy” turned up the most number of hits. There were a couple of emails I didn’t want to lose, so for each of those I would just enter “-searchterm” to exclude it from the results….and deleting them was easier than I thought.

By clicking “Select all conversations that match this search,” I was able to get everything in one shot and managed to delete about 2100 emails in a couple of minutes using different search terms.

Some of the terms I used were:

privacy
unsubscribe
“address book”
“this email was sent to”
“all rights reserved”

…and probably a few others. Ideas on what to search for (and what to exclude!) were best found by just going through my inbox, opening emails I’d like to trash, and finding a word or phrase that would be limited to similar unwanted emails.

The only thing I wasn’t able to catch were those random spam emails filled with gibberish — you know, the ones that say…

Yes, indeed. A concert for the public. Barbecues and free drinks. The public will see Svinjar as a benefactor of the first order. I gather that you are prepared to play a benefit performance?

…accompanied by a Cialis logo or some other male or female wonder pill……. I’m thinking it may be tough luck on those…but hey, 2100 out of 2700 isn’t bad!