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Gmail Adds 30 Day Mass Delete For Spam Bin
from the moving-forward dept
TDavid writes "A couple weeks back I wrote about how Gmail was missing a feature to mass delete emails in the "spam" bin and that I'd confirmed with the Gmail team that this feature had not yet been available. Since this is a beta product, they are looking for feedback and I was hoping to get folks to contact them and request this feature. Good news! This campaign seemed to help. Over the weekend I noticed a new message in the Gmail spam bin that indicates: "Warning: Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted." This would be great except that the automatic deletion does not (yet) seem to be fully enabled. Currently the automatic deletion is moving slower than the spam actually comes in." As I mentioned in the addition to the original article, it seemed likely that they would add a time-based delete feature for spam -- and I'm sure it will start working better at some point. Of course, it would be nice of them to let users choose whether or not to enable this. I've used the Gmail search feature to find older messages that were designated as spam, but turned out not to be. Also, I should mention that since the complaint last month that the Gmail spam filter wasn't particularly good, it seems to have improved a great deal. It's still not great, but it's certainly getting closer to other spam solutions out there.
Reader Comments
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No Subject Given
Last time I checked the Spam folder did not count towards the storage quota. The same with Yahoo! Mail, you can keep the junk mail forever, they will use it to improve their filters, and you won't be penalized for keeping it. So it really doesn't matter - spam stuff doesn't show up in searches on Google Inbox and does not take up precious space.
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Re: No Subject Given
Spam absolutely *does* count towards your storage quota in Gmail. The vast majority of my storage in Gmail is taken up by spam...
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Re: No Subject Given
Ah, my bad then. Had so little of it that it didnt seem to make a whole lot of difference in the account quota.
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No Subject Given
I dont know what you are doing to get so much spam. I am very promiscuous with my emaill adresses, and I get about 3-4 true spam a week. They are all caught by gmail. I get a handful more of annoying newsletters and whatnot, but I signed up for them and just dont want them anymore. Its my own fault for not unsubscribing, so I don't consider that spam.
Anyway, the delete after 30 days thing has been in there for months, maybe the notice is new tho. The same thing is true for the trash. Anything sitting in either the trash or the spam goes away after 30 days.
As for legitimate stuff in the spam folder, if you haven't looked through it in the last 30 days, chances are you never are, and so the mail is effectively lost anyway. If gmail did let you mass delete, you would delete that mail and then it would definately be gone for good. Keep the issue of spam identification seperate from the ease of deleting large ammounts of emails.
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Re: No Subject Given
It's not a question of going back and looking for it immediately, but realizing later on, or being told later on about a missed email, and being able to do a quick search... something I have done.
And I'm pretty sure that Gmail did *not* delete old messages in the spam box. That was what caused the original poster's problem.
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Re: No Subject Given
Jason - Mike is correct, please check out the screenshot. It proves that Gmail isn't (yet) getting rid of all email older than 30 days in the spam bin. And also links to the earlier story (both from Techdirt and my blog) explaining what and how the results were obtained.
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