How to clean up your Gmail inbox by quickly deleting old email

If you have too many emails in your Gmail account, it may finally be time to clean it up. It’s not just a matter of achieving zen nirvana of “zero inbox”, but of facing an imminent threat: From June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policy. By default, Gmail users receive 15 GB of storage, shared between Gmail, Drive, and Photos. Some data, like Photos, is currently exempt, but it disappears in June. If your total data exceeds your free allowance, you will either need to delete data or pay Google for more storage space, or risk losing the “extra” data that Google chooses to delete.

Don’t let this happen! Here are some tactics for deleting lots of emails, pronto.

How to quickly delete old email in Gmail

The only requirement to purge old emails from Google Gmail is that you must be signed in to Gmail and using it on a browser from a Chrome, Mac or Windows PC, or an Android tablet or an iPad. These commands can be available from a smartphone, but they are designed primarily for the web interface.

First of all, you need to know how much storage capacity your email takes up. If you scroll to the bottom of your Gmail page, you can see the space occupied by all of your data, not just Gmail! If you’re a Google One subscriber, your Google One storage page splits it between Gmail, Photos, and Drive. (Tip: You can block automatic uploads from Google Photos to help you manage your storage.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

Now let’s start deleting.

The easiest way to delete spam emails from Gmail is to use Google’s built-in section tabs in Gmail, which already filter emails into multiple sections: your main tab (your main inbox), followed social networks, promotions, updates and forums. The implicit message here is that Google already considers the email stored in your main tab to be the email you actually need.–everything else can probably be sacrificed.

Typically, I purge anything in my Promotions tab first – it’s almost but not quite spam. Take a last look at a few pages to make sure you want to do a wholesale purge. (If you want to selectively delete emails, skip to the section below.)

To start the process, first click on the Promotions tab (the label will display as color rather than gray). Then from the ribbon of icons above the tabs, click on the little checkbox icon on the far left, like this:

Melissa Riofrio / IDG

This should highlight all the emails you can see on the first page of the Promotions tab, not all the ones you have in Gmail.

After selecting the value of emails from this page, Google confirms your selection and gives you the option to select all emails in the Promotions tab, if you click on the message highlighted in blue as shown below:

Mark Hachman / IDG

You can then press the Wipe off or click on the little trash can icon in the menu ribbon above to delete the entire email. You will receive a small pop-up titled “Confirm Bulk Action”, warning you that “this action will affect all … inbox conversations” and asking if you want to continue. If you do, click Okay.

Congratulations! All your promotion emails have been deleted … sort of. Yes, your email is not quite gone yet. Gmail simply moved it to the trash, another of the categories accessible through the left navigation rail. (Scroll down and click After to display the Trash and Spam folders.) Click Trash can to see all your deleted emails, pending deletion.

Mark Hachman / IDG

By default, Google gives you 30 days before automatically deleting emails that have been placed in the trash. This gives you 30 days to find and save an email that you accidentally put in the trash, but it still leaves your total Google One storage allowance unchanged. (You can highlight the email (or emails) and click on the little “Move to” folder icon to move them back to the inbox if you have discovered an email that you want to save. .)

Mark Hachman / IDG

If you want, you can click on the Empty the trash now at the top of your Trash mailing list to delete all of those emails once and for all. This will reduce your storage allowance, but there is no going back now. (Unfortunately, you cannot see the storage capacity of all the emails accumulated in your Trash folder.) Once you manually delete these emails, they are gone forever!

You can now decide if you want to delete emails in other Gmail tabs as well. I generally consider the email notifications in my “Forums” folder to be exhausted, and I tend to do the same with my Social tab. The Updates tab usually hides messages from apps and other services that I consider important, so I don’t often delete these emails without consideration or additional filtering.

How to filter emails in Gmail

Filter, you say? Absolutely yes. The Gmail search box at the top of your screen will do more than search for keywords. You can use search filters for all kinds of things to weed out junk emails, and Google lists a number of them on its Gmail search support page.

Here are some particularly useful commands for reducing the storage space consumed by your inbox, listed below. Just type the bold text into the Gmail search box.

• before: 04/18/2018 This returns all emails to the folder sent before April 18, 2018.
• oldest: 2m This displays all emails that are older than two months. You can exchange the “m” for “y” (year) or “d” (day). Note that newer than can also be used.
• a: attachment Any e-mail with attachments.
• filename: pdf Any email with a PDF file attached.
• Cut:
• bigger:
• smaller: Is Cut: or bigger: can be used to search for messages that are larger than a certain size in bytes. Here you can use largest: 100 for a message of more than 100 bytes, or largest: 15M for a message larger than 15 megabytes.

Others, such as from: eliza (Eliza’s email) or is important (for emails listed as important), can also be helpful.

Hopefully, these tools will allow you to reduce your Gmail inbox to a manageable size. Good hunt!