Victor Solberg

Gmail’s spam feature does a good job at capturing most of the spam I receive. It marks those emails as spam, which shows up as a label with an unread count, effectively telling you every single time you open your email that you are receiving a large amount of spam. I find this to be distracting. Not very distracting - just a little bit - but every time I open my email.

I don’t like clutter in my email so I clean out my inbox on a daily basis. That leaves my inbox empty, but there’s still the distraction of the spam. I do occasionally go through and see if the emails are actually spam, but I don’t want to do it very often. And I want it to be when I have time, not when I see that I should. My solution is to hide Gmail’s spam count.

Step 1:Open Settings (top right corner) and click on Filters.

Step 2: Choose search criteria

In the “Has the words:” field you write in:spam.

Leave the rest of the fields blank.

Step 3: Choose action

Select Mark as read.

You can also choose to have the spam deleted immediately, which might be a good option if you never get non-spam email in your spam folder. I, however, don’t want my filter to be quite that drastic. I just want to hide the spam count.

There you go. No more distractions!