Follow-up to Gmail recommendation

Last week I talked about using Gmail as your primary email account (for more details, just see my last blog entry - below).

When I work on a Gmail user's computer, one thing that I often see is that the Gmail website inbox has hundreds or thousands of emails just sitting there. What a mess! The reason for this is that Gmail does not offer the use of folders like other email services. Instead, they allow you to "label" an email (that's a subject for another tip, another day).

There is a quick, easy solution to cleaning up your Gmail inbox - and it doesn't involve losing or deleting any of your emails:

1. Click the link that says "Select all"
2. Click the new link that says "Select all ### conversations in Inbox" (where ### is the number of emails in the Inbox)
3. Now that all Inbox emails have been selected, click the "Archive" button and then click Yes on the "Do you want to continue" question.

Now you will see that your inbox is completely empty. If you want to see all of the emails that were just there a minute ago, you can always do that by clicking the "All Mail" link on the left side.

Note: the above procedure only applies when you are looking at the web-based version of Gmail (at www.gmail.com). If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express, you can clean up your inbox by placing those emails in a folder or folders of your choice.

This week's video - a boxer having trouble getting into (and out of) the ring