Hack 22. Clear Your Inbox Quickly


Process hundreds of messages in one fell swoop.

If you forward all your messages to your BlackBerry, there has probably been a time where you'd like to process many of the messages in your inbox at once instead of clicking through each. Sometimes an errant automated task can send you hundreds of messages that you don't need to read. At other times, you may have already read several messages using your email program on your PC, so you'd like to mark every previous message on your BlackBerry as read.

Luckily, BlackBerry offers a feature to do just this.

2.2.1. Process Many Messages at Once

In your Messages application, all your messages are sorted by the date they were received by your device. For each day, there will be a date heading that serves as a divider that shows you which messages were received on which day.

Use the trackwheel to select a particular date and click the trackwheel to bring up a menu. By default, the Compose Mail option will be selected. Above that selection are two options: Mark Prior Opened and Delete Prior (see Figure 2-1). These options do exactly as you'd expect they mark all previous messages as deleted or read.

Figure 2-1. The Bulk Message functions on the menu


If you have a lot of messages on your device to mark opened, it could take some time to go through and mark each message read even if there are only a few unread messages. Your device still has to check each message on your device to see if it is read or not. To solve this, you can select multiple adjacent messages by holding down the Shift key and using the trackwheel to highlight the unread messages. This will perform the operation only on the messages you selected rather than the entire list, so it will be much faster.

2.2.2. Hack the Hack

You can use this hack to process the results of a search as well. Let's say an automated job that sends you email just sent you 100 messages before you were able to stop it. Perhaps they are interspersed among other important messages that you need to read. If there is some commonality in the automated messages, such as the same subject or sender, you can use the search function to confine your results to only these messages.

Select one of the errant messages in your message list, click the trackwheel, and scroll down the menu to the search section. Choose Search, Search Sender, or Search Subject to get only those messages that you want to delete. Once the search completes, you'll have just those messages that meet your criteria in the list. These search results are still divided by the date received by your BlackBerry, so you can use the steps from the previous section to confine your bulk deletion to only these messages.

If you're using a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and you've enabled wireless email reconciliation, although the Mark Prior Opened function is reconciled with your server mailbox, the Delete Prior function is never reconciled. This is to prevent an inadvertent mass deletion of emails off your mail server. To have the deletions on the device reconcile with your server mailbox, you'll need to delete the messages one by one.




BlackBerry Hacks
Blackberry Hacks: Tips & Tools for Your Mobile Office
ISBN: 0596101155
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 164
Authors: Dave Mabe

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