List tables' "select all" should let you really select all, regardless of screen options

[evansolomon]

The select all checkbox in list tables selects all the items in your current view. Usually what I really want is to select all the items on all the pages.

As a hack, I'll often leave the screen options setting for items per page on something really high, like 1,000. Unfortunately this means the tables are often really slow for no benefit (most of the time I don't need them all). A better solution would be a way to intelligently select all items without needing to show them on the page.

The best example of this that I know of is Gmail, which adds a line above the list of emails when you click the select all box that looks something like this: "All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 653 conversations in Spam". The second sentence is a link that, as expected, selects all of your emails that fit the current view, regardless of paging. Screenshot attached.