14 DAY TRIAL // Picture this: you start receiving tons of spam from a lot of foreign countries and it takes so much of your inbox that you can't really find your regular email conversations even if you go to the third page or so. And if you're looking back to the third page you must be either really anxious about reading the new mail or very angry about how far back you have to go in order for that to happen.
Of course it's a hypothetical situation but bear with me. What is there to be done about the situation? Apparently the only viable solution is the manual deletion of all the spam, assuming you know what addresses it comes from and you don't have to check every single one. Well? yeah, if your mail is in only one language it's easy to do that, just delete whatever messages whose title you cannot understand, but if you're having pen pals (actually email pals) that speak three or four languages and? that's going to result in a whole lot of work. Enjoy.
I hope to have induced you by now in that state of mind where you'd go on a rampage if this were to happen. Don't! A user found a command that sorts out the messages written in a specific language of your choice and only displays them.
You just have to write "language:Portuguese", "lang:Portuguese" or "lang:pt" in the search mail tab and it'll work its magic. Not all it's magic, some results will be omitted at random but it will basically get the job done until you set up the spam filters.
Ionut Alex Chitu hopes on his blog that "Gmail could provide an option to automatically translate messages written in a language you don't know and add many other useful features from web search (spelling suggestions, query expansion, search refinements)."
What's left to hope more than that? Nothing and in the words of an old Mills Brothers' song, "Till then?"