The honest version.

I had 4,000 unread emails because I'd been ignoring my inbox for two years and the number stopped meaning anything. I wanted to zero it out and start fresh so I could stay on top of what matters.

Gmail lets you do this. You select all, mark as read. Except it stops at 50 emails at a time. So you do it again. And again. Eighty times if you have 4,000. It's tedious in a way that feels specifically designed to make you give up.

There is a way around it that Reddit has figured out, though even the native method has a catch nobody tells you about: it only works if your inbox is sorted by Most Recent, not Most Relevant. How dumb.

The Gmail API has no such limit. You can clear 1,000+ at a time. I built this small tool to connect to Gmail, fetch all the unread IDs, and remove the UNREAD label from every one of them. It takes a few seconds and doesn't store anything. When you close the tab, we're done.

The bigger reason

I'm making a film called Ghost. A found footage action thriller about a crew of skilled, morally complicated people who get in far deeper than they planned. Every skill and stunt is as real as possible.

No studio or institutional investors. No one telling us what it needs to be. Which also means no funding. The budget is $830,000. The path to get there without investors is to build things people find useful and ask for voluntary support.

Vail0 is one of those things. It's free and it's mildly useful. If you want to contribute toward Ghost, here's the Venmo link. If not, the tool still works exactly the same.

I appreciate every bit of help to avoid millionaire investors telling me what a film about real people doing real things needs to be.

What Vail0 is not

It's not a startup. There's no growth team, no investor deck, no roadmap built around engagement metrics. It's a utility that does one thing, made by one person, to solve a small problem and hopefully fund something real.

If you want to stay updated on the tool or the film, the signup is below. Neither list gets sold or shared. You can unsubscribe at any time.