GMAIL – Marking all emails as READ in GMAIL (in all of your inboxes & spam boxes) 

UPDATE: see comment below 4 much faster method

1. select All Mail mailbox – OR – type “is:unread” without the quotes in the search box

2. Select “all” with top left square button (list comes down All, None, Read, Unread, etc..) – so that the current 20 to 30 messages on your screen get selected

3. Popup appears to select all of the mail across everything

4. Select Read All mail (now it will apply Read All mail to everything)

SLOW WAY:

Summary/Quick Info:

*STEP1* Make sure Keyboard shorcuts are enabled: Top right click the Gear button -> select “Settings” -> Scroll down to “Keyboard shortcuts” -> Select “Keyboard shorcuts on”
*STEP2* Go back to inbox (it will go thru every box either way), and type in the search box type “is: unread” or “is:unread” (both equally work)
*STEP3* Now hold Shift and type and “8ai” without the quotes of course
That will mark 20 or so emails that your seeing as read
*STEP4* Repeat STEP3 until all are read

Now to keep going until all are unread…
Hold shift (you dont have to let go of it) and just keep on typing away 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai
Until you see that every box is at 0 unread messages

So remember: is:unread and SHIFT 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai

Your done you dont have to read the rest…

Long version:

NOTE: this method searches thru all of your boxes, not just inbox (even the spam boxes, which amazing).

Personally I like looking at all my mail and seeing its read.

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Unfortunatly I dont know of a shortcut to mark all email as READ.

However I know a fun and quick way to do so.

First you need to make sure your GMAIL account has KEYBOARD shortcuts enabled (Top right click the Gear button -> select “Settings” -> Scroll down to “Keyboard shortcuts” -> Select “Keyboard shorcuts on”)

Now in the Search box for your GMAIL type
is:unread

Now here are the shortcuts we will be useing

* (hold shift and press 8/*) then click the a button (lowercase a) – that will select all mail
I (Shift-i) – marks mail as read
U (Shift-u) – marks mail as unread

So to do the trick do this:
Hold Shift then press 8, release Shift, press a, hold shift press i
Get into that habbit and thats a quick an easy way

Each time you do that it will mark as read like 20 of your emails
So if you have 1000s of emails (scattered thru all of your inboxes)

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okay just kidding that process is very muscle memory intensive, and even if you play guitar fast (or type fast) this is hard
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Easiest way:
Well it turns out you dont have to type lower case a, it can in fact be a upper case A. So you can hold shift the whole time

So hold SHIFT
And type 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai 8ai
Each time you type 8ai like 20 or so emails get selected and marked as read. As soon as they are marked as read, the next batch of unread emails appears because the search box says to only show “is: unread” email