Gmail question

[katiesue]

I can't seem to find a way to do a sort in gmail. In yahoo or outlook you click on the header for say sender, subject and it will sort your mail alphabetically by that item. Gmail has no headers and I can't find a way to sort. I like to do alphabetically by sender to do clean ups, makes it easy to delete all the ads etc. Anyone know if this is possible?

[Ghoulish Delight]

No, there is no direct way to do it.

There are some workarounds to do some level of sorting using labels and some of the search features, but to specifically get the alphabetical-by-sender view is not really doable. The simplest (albeit inadequate) analog would be to type "from:[sender's name]" into the search box to pull up an individual person's emails.

[katiesue]

That's what I thought - ratz. It's just an easy way to clean out all the junk.

[Alex]

Gmail is very intentionally designed on a paradigm of fast and easy searching instead of sorting.

A couple tricks I use to ease cleaning trash or unread repetitive emails:

1. If you hover over the sender name on and click "Recent Conversations" it will automatically filter you down to just emails to/from that person. You can then select all (even if more than displays on one page) and delete.

2. I have a filter set up to apply an "Unwanted" label to emails as they come in. Any time I notice that I am getting regular email from someone that I never actually read I just ad them to the filter. I can then select that label, select all, and delete.

Back when Facebook was still sending a billion emails to me a day, it only took me about 8 seconds to select them all and delete them when the mood struck.