How do I move lots of emails to a label in Gmail at once?

Last reviewed: October 15, 2026 · Markdown version

On a computer: search for the mail, tick the Select box, click the link that selects every matching conversation, then click Labels and pick the label. There is no folder to drag mail into, because Gmail has labels instead, and Google says so first on its labels page: "Labels are different from folders" (Create & manage labels in Gmail, read 15 October 2026). Moving mail in Gmail means adding one label and, if you want, removing another. The phone apps can do the same for a handful of messages at a time.

What "moving" means with labels

Google's Workspace guide puts the difference in one line: "Labels are like folders, but with a twist—you can apply several labels to an email" (Organize and find email, read 15 October 2026). So a move is two edits. Google's steps for moving one email to another label are: tick it, "At the top, click Labels", "Uncheck the current label" and "Select a new label" (the labels page above). If the mail was in your inbox and you want it out of the inbox too, archive it once it is labelled; the label is how you will find it again.

Selecting hundreds at once, on a computer

Search for exactly the mail you mean: a sender, a subject, a date range. Google's own examples include From: fatima@cymbal.com and after:2025/3/29 before:2025/4/5 (Delete messages in Gmail, read 15 October 2026).
"To select all messages on the current page, at the top left, above your messages, check the Select box."
Gmail then offers to extend the selection. Google's example of the notice: "All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 2,000 conversations in Inbox." Then: "To select all conversations, click the link in the notification."
Click Labels and choose one. To move rather than add, untick the old label in the same list.

A caveat about the source. Steps 2 and 3 come from Google's page on deleting mail, where the selection is followed by Delete. The labels page describes labelling "the email" with a single tick and does not mention the select-all link, so no Google page we read today says in words that Labels acts on all 2,000 (the Delete messages and Create & manage labels pages above). Before relabelling a large search, try it on a small one and check the result.

The keyboard version

With shortcuts switched on (Settings, See all settings, "Keyboard shortcuts on", Save Changes), Google lists * + a to "Select all conversations", v to open the "move to" menu and l to open the "label as" menu (Keyboard shortcuts for Gmail, read 15 October 2026). The shortcut page does not say whether * + a reaches beyond the page you are looking at, so treat it like the Select box and look for the notice.

On a phone

The apps select by touch. On Android, "Touch and hold one or more emails", then More, then Move to, and choose the label (Create & manage labels, Android, read 15 October 2026). On iPhone and iPad it is More, then Change labels, untick the current ones, choose new ones and tap Done (Create & manage labels, iPhone & iPad, read 15 October 2026). Both pages also let you make Move a swipe action. Neither describes a select-all, so for a few hundred messages the computer is the practical tool.

Replies that arrive later

One line on Google's labels page explains why a thread you just moved can seem to split: "If you turn on the conversation view, the label applies only to the existing messages, not to new replies." Mail that keeps arriving from the same place is better handled by a filter that applies the label on arrival. How filters work has the steps, and what labels are good for helps you decide whether this label is worth having.