Google® Tip: Weeding gmail

Have you ever deleted several hundred emails from your gmail account and wished you hadn’t?

I have. (this tag line is comedian Tom Papa’s trademark … thanks, Tom.)

Seriously, I accumulated several hundred Google® Scholar alerts over the past couple of years, all of which I kept “just in case.”

Finally deciding to do some end of year house cleaning, I began searching my gmail account for all my Google® Scholar alerts so I could delete them. To my dismay, a simple search for google scholar alerts netted a number of emails that were not Google® Scholar alerts, and which I wanted to keep.

I really did not want to go through page after page of results to uncheck each item I wanted to keep. As I was fussing and fuming, I noticed, at the end of the page, a phrase in very small font which said … and I quote …

Improve result with search options such as sender, date, size and more.

I clicked on the link, which brought up a form with a bunch of options. I filled in the sender box with the Google® Scholar sending email address (scholaralerts-noreply@google.com). To my delight, this resulted in all of the Google® Scholar alerts I wanted to delete, WITHOUT the emails I wanted to keep.

So, here is the procedure …

GMAIL Weeding Procedure Using Advanced Filters
Enter your search string in the Gmail search mail box as usual
Scroll to the bottom of the page
Click the link in the phrase Improve result with search options such as sender, date, size and more.
Fill in the resulting form as appropriate for your purposes