Make Gmail less painful for obsessives: set Promotions to "Read" status.

You know who you are. When you see a number badge you gotta clear it. When you open Gmail and see “5 updates” in Promotions you have to get rid of ‘em.

Yeah, we need drugs.

But I’ve got something even better. A Gmail filter that sets all email of type “Promotions” to a status of Read. Brief version:

Create gmail filter so promotions auto-read. | Gordon's shares:

enter the value “label:^smartlabel_promo” in the “Has the words” field, then mark as read. Ignore warning. No promotions are easy to ignore, delete at leisure.

For the full story see Stack Exchange. The Stack Exchange article is about recreating the Promotions filter after deleting it, but you can use the same filter logic to set status to Read:

1. Create a new filter and enter the value "label:^smartlabel_promo" in the "Has the words" field. When you do a sample filter search, that value becomes "category:promotions" automatically
2. Set action to  “Mark as Read”

When you do this you have to click through a warning message:

Yeah, Google doesn’t want you to do this. When you’re done you get:

You could also send all Promotions to the trash of course. I may yet do that, but for now I ignore them until I get the urge to select all and delete.

Now if only I didn’t have to do shift-click on edit subject then shift click to get Compose Window floating for every ding-dang email reply.