Appreciation of the mark-all-as-read button

I never appreciated it until I found that proton mail does not have one. My inbox there makes me cringe.

A bugbear: iOS' default mail client having the "Mark as Read" and "Move to Junk" actions on an all-selection right next to each other (with no undo option) is maddening.

RSS feeds do have ads. They don’t have much of them because they’re not popular, but if the tech were more used they’d have more…

Physically shaking the device triggers a confirmation dialog to undo actions in many apps, including in Mail.

Shake for an undo prompt or three finger tap for a menu that includes undo/redo. Both apply throughout iOS.

What I want is more implementations of Hotmail's (outlook online) sweep feature. Zoho has it (called scrub) but most other email clients do not. Essentially it allows you to instantly move/delete mails from a single address en masse without having to jump through 5 different filter modals like Gmail.

RSS feeds are actually used quite a lot in the podcasting industry. And indeed, nothing guarantees that you won't get ads in those podcasts, because ad insertion is done server-side in a lot of cases, so the media URL in the RSS feed will be served with ads in it.

Oh, wow, I'm surprised that I keep getting surprised at how undiscoverable ios functionality is. I still can't get over being flabbergasted about a decade ago at how the only way to switch their calculator app to scientific mode is by rotating the phone to landscape mode.

Use "in:inbox from:foo@bar.com" in gmail's search and no need for any modals. The email address even autocompletes based on emails you've received.

> rather than leaving all there I can mark everything as read and get back to a neutral state

Remembering the last thing you already been shown and not presenting it anymore is what computers used to do, back in the 1970s.

(a third advantage to RSS: because local storage is dirt cheap, it's searchable — even the stuff I'd mark-all-as-read'ed)

Yes but it is not very efficient when you have many emails. In Hotmail/Zoho it is two clicks.

I'm in proton mail on FF I select all inbox in the select box upper right hand corner of the inbox ui.

all conversations on page selected - says You selected 50 conversations. next to it link text - Select all 2638 in inbox.

clicking select all 2638 in inbox selects all conversations.

next to checkbox where I selected conversations is a row of icons, first icon is an open mail that has the title "Mark all as read R"

When I use Mark all as read on selected conversations they become read, however they are still selected which is makes this stuff somewhat unclear.

Sounds OK until you've been shown something but haven't interacted with it, and then you want to see it again later.

Outlook has ctrl-q to mark as read, and ctrl-a to select all. A tiny error on pushing the button to mark a single mail as read sets everything to read, with no undo available.

> Every time I open my RSS feed, there’s nothing there. I can’t doom scroll through it. Because there’s nothing there. So I only open my RSS reader when I want to read something

That's a waste of a manual refresh action - if you only open the reader when you want to read something, there is no point in not auto-refreshing on open so you can... read something.

> I can mark everything as read and get back to a neutral state. And just like that, I’m done with my timeline. Isn’t that amazing?

Not really, you've described a workflow with the same "FOMO" and "chore" downsides: you have to invest time into reviewing the whole batch of downloaded content otherwise if you mark everything as read you fear you've missed something important that you haven't reviewed it. Some clients can even auto-mark links on scroll so you reduce the risk of mislabeling, but these are still not refined enough controls to tacke the issue.

(and yes, of course there are ads in RSS)

that's exactly why I mentioned the search: search in the last day/week for ${KEYWORD} and it usually comes back up quickly.

(when I made hotkeys to view alphabetical splits, so if I don't read for a while i still don't get presented with more than a screenful of titles at once, thanks to newsboat(1) keeping its state in SQLite, I was able to base my counts off having queried the database of everything I'd already RSS'ed, interacted with or not)

I like mark-all-as-read, but I reeeaaallly like not having a read/unread dichotomy in the first place, since it wires my brain to treating everything like a to do list.

I use the excellent vore (vore.website) for rss and I just get a chronological list off my RSS feeds. My brain has a feature called "memory" that stops me accidentally reading any articles twice, and even better, I don't have a feeling of obligation to my rss feed reader.

OK, but being shown something makes it far, far more discoverable than having to search for it.

For context, I'm thinking very generally here rather than about specific use cases, but it seems to me that anything happening 'automatically' in this area can be problematic. I'm not sure what the best setup is, but I think any system that shows a list of time-sensitive stuff (email, rss feeds) should at least be keeping a record of 'times shown', 'times opened', etc.

Yup. My most frequently used feature of Android notification systems is notification history. Notifications somehow manage to be 90%+ noise, and so easy to dismiss that the important 10% I only spot as they disappear...

Seriously?

I know that Instagram has this silly feature of "shake to show a 'report a bug' prompt" - I know it because it occasionally turns on for no apparent reason.

It's even less discoverable than any undocumented gesture out there. Percussive maintenance is a joke, and the only people who actually shake something in anger are fictional characters in movies and animation, because that's done for comedic effect. And maybe people with serious anger management issues. Neither connotation make this gesture a sensible choice.

Yeah, I appreciate others want discoverability, but I don't. My RSS feeds are, per Sturgeon's Law Squared, 99% crap.

I've got my hotkeys configured so I get a screenful of titles, pick 0-2 that look like they might be of interest, then mark-all-as-read to get a new screenful. Every now and then I get a little quick with the "Ay", and then either search, or if it was immediate markers' remorse, "l" to show read as well as unread, and pick up whatever I was FOMO'ing so hard on — often to be reminded to trust my initial judgement.

In the unlikely* event that doesn't work, well, feeds are entertainment anyway: if an idea is really important it'll come around again, maybe from the same source, maybe a different one.

* as I've said, the db elephants everything, so it's difficult to lose anything; currently it's using like 1/1000th of my disk space and I'm not sure it gets bigger much faster than storage gets cheaper.

Lagniappe: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html

I always thought shake-to-undo was a reference to resetting an Etch A Sketch.

It’s not discoverable, but it is in the user guide.

If you find yourself accidentally activating it, you can turn it off in accessibility settings.

If you would rather have a button for it, you can turn on assistive touch.

Can we have a mark-all-as-read button that sends back messages saying "The recipient clicked mark-all-as-read, please resend if it is important"?

In gnu evolution (when it hasn't randomly decided to render the entire message window as all black), you can navigate messages with [ and ] to jump to the latest or last unread message, then depending on whether it decides to actually work in marking the message read as soon as you view it, you can press Ctrl + K to force the message to toggle its read status.

In Outlook, because I have so many folders due to sieve rules, I scroll to the bottom of my account where there is an unread emails view that I scroll through and mark the ones read that need to be, then right click the whole folder and hit mark all as read.

Then I just have to wait for 15 minutes as Outlook figures out how to synchronize all that!

K-9 at least on the 6.x version that I remain on so I don't get dragged into Thunderbird Mobile and it's nasty new UI, the only way to set something to appear in the unified inbox is to go folder by agonizing folder and add it, not something I want to spend the time to do, so I end up scrolling through folders and looking at messages manually.

I even have ads in news site RSS (e.g. MacGeneration).

I had to log back in HN to reply to this because it was worth it.

I’m not wasting a manual refresh action. I’m adding some intentionality and some friction in my digital interactions.

Life is not just about optimizing everything.

As for the FOMO, I disagree. Posts are still there. Blogs are still out there. An RSS reader is not where the content lives but just an interface.

And no, there are no ads in RSS. Because the people I follow don’t share ads. Same is not true for social media where a 3rd party can inject whatever the hell they want.

My RSS diet is 99% personal blogs. I can assure you there are no ADS. If I were to follow those same people on social media my timeline would be flooded by random ads. That’s the difference.

Why? That will just make people afraid of using the button, because such an email looks bad.

I feel the opposite: I want more things to track read/unread.

When I pop into my RSS reader, my sole goal is to read something new. I want to read from one publication at a time, and I want to know I've seen everything they post (not every article is worth reading, but if their best content isn't so good that I care about missing it, they aren't worth subscribing to).

Without read/unread this doesn't work. I've got too many feeds to just remember the latest thing I've read in each. And I want my RSS reader to only show publications with new articles, rather than clicking one after another like pulling a slot machine to see if it has new articles. And my memory isn't perfect — I may mistakenly think I've already read something (especially when a big story is covered repeatedly in many places). It's nicer to just let the computer worry about it.

This is one of the big reasons I convert my social media follows into RSS (I just did bsky last night). I want an inbox!

For me, it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels peaceful knowing I definitely saw everything I might care about, and that I delegated the tedious parts to a machine.

You could choose a different message if you want, I suppose.

Okay, I just went looking for it and found at least the search can be done in gmail in two clicks as well: Right click an email, pick "Find emails from ...." near the bottom of gmail's custom menu. It doesn't have the "in:inbox" part of the search but presumably that's not much an issue since new emails would be at the top and gmail does display tags (including "Inbox") next to the subject line.

I tried this before, it doesn't handle group emails correctly. Google groups is one of the official methods recommended by Google to have a shared inbox and this filter automatically selects all emails sent to the group's address rather than by sender.

It's so interesting how different people all are! I 100% get everything you're saying, but for me "knowing I definitely saw everything" is just something I'm not able to care about without accidentally making the whole business feel like work.

I thia is exactly what makes RSS great. You and me can both subscribe to the same blog/podcast/whatever, but choose different technologies that fit how we want to use it. That's something that could never really happen on traditional social media.

>there is no point in not auto-refreshing on open so you can... read something.

I hate things that auto refresh instead of just coming back to where I left off. Obviously if it's empty, sure refresh, but if it's outdated because I backgrounded it for a couple of days, let me decide to refresh or not.

All of the other child replies are correct that there are ways around this. But the fact remains that the default set of interacting behaviors (the one I described) is crap.

The original argument here is against your "obviously refresh empty" point.

> adding some intentionality and some friction in my digital interactions.

That's what's opening an app is

> An RSS reader is not where the content lives but just an interface.

Yes it practically is, do you remember all the source links to be able to visit and read them without RSS? Do you also remember which ones you've saved in your favourites so you haven't skipped something important on second review?

> Same is not true for social media

It is true, if you can be so selective about sources you read, you can also be selective about social media you choose, and there are some that have no ads