Gmail mistakenly removed the button that lets you triage loads of emails at once, but it’s coming back

If you’re not the inbox zero type — and I’m definitely not — you might sometimes rely on Gmail’s “Select all conversations that match this search” option to read, archive, or delete hundreds or thousands of messages at once.

Except we can’t do that anymore, and neither can a number of angry Gmail users we’ve spotted. The option has up and disappeared. Google accidentally removed it, the company confirms to The Verge.

Instead of the option, we’re seeing a nav bar with a handful of shortcut buttons when we search, like this:

Thankfully, Google tells The Verge it’s coming back “as soon as possible,” adding:

We are working to bring back the feature in Gmail that allows you to ‘select all conversations that match this search’ as soon as possible. This feature was removed unintentionally. We apologize to our users who may have been affected.

That’ll be good news to those who posted in this Gmail help thread from six days ago, which had gone unanswered until now, and it explains why Google’s own Gmail support team was unaware of a change; on at least a couple occasions, they’d been giving readers instructions that no longer work.

For now, if you want to read, archive, or delete more than a page worth of conversations at a time, you may need to use a filter instead, using the “Also apply filter to matching conversations” button, and then delete the filter after the fact.

I just gave it a try with some newsletters, and it still seems to work.

Update, 5:55 PM ET: Added Google’s explanation that this was just a mistake.