The worst part is that once is a while if you try to filter by the unread mails, gmail doesn't provide this option out of the box. Because of this you would have some unread mails stuck up from the past which is not easily navagatable by the paging option.
But once you know the command to filter by its an easy task to filter by unread mails and see all the unread mails.
The trick is to search by the label "unread". For this, in the search box type the following:
label:unread
This would filter out all the unread mails in your mailbox. You can also use combination searches; for instance if you want to seach all unread mails from your inbox you can type in the search box as:
in:inbox label:unread
There are many more search options google provide, but not out of the box via the user interface.
Happy cleaning up your gmail mailbox.