Gmail Hint: Deleting made easy


Do you find it a chore to delete a message in Gmail?  Or, do you prefer to use the keyboard rather than moving from mouse to keyboard and back again?

I do.

Here is a handy hint to help, I’ve just revolutionised the way I use Gmail with a few simple keystrokes:

Go to Settings
Go to Labs
Activate Keyboard Shortcuts (you may have to click on settings again to refresh)
Choose Keyboard Shortcuts from within Settings
Locate “Move to Trash” and set it to be “-” (a minus sign)
Locate “Mark as Unread” and set it to “§” (or whatever is the key below the Esc key)

Now from your inbox simply hit the minus key to delete the message, or from within a message, hit minus and it’s gone, moved to Trash in easy one step no mouse needed – or of course you can hit ‘y’ to archive it.
When you delete a message whilst reading it your inbox is then re-displayed.

So, I go: enter (to read) “y” or “-” to archive/trash and then enter again to read next one (and repeat).

It’s *so* quick as” -” and enter (on numpad) are co-located – it’s easy.

Use “§” to mark a a message as unread (I do this if I want to revisit the message for actioning as I keep my inbox empty).  I use the § key as it’s a similar location to Esc and I use it to “escape” back to the inbox leaving the message unread.

Of course, if easier, you can choose other keys if you find them more suitable but make sure they aren’t already allocated to another function.

:)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under gmail, help, how-to, support, tip, tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Gmail Hint: Deleting made easy”

  1. Portable Air Conditioners.net says:
    February 18, 2009 at 12:01 am

    I use Gmail on my iphone 3g..and it always worked fine, until all of a sudden it stopped working. It would not update my email and just say “connecting….” and then “cannot connect to imap.google.com”. It was so frustrating! I tried several things, none of which worked. Finally I got a tip from someone online to just go into gmail on my computer and change my password to something more secure. Up until then my password had just been a simple word, but after changing it to something with a number and longer word in it, gmail worked on my phone again. But gosh it was so frustrating when it wasn’t working.

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