Clean Up Your Gmail Inbox
GMAIL USERS ENJOY A GENEROUS INBOX quota of over 15GB. While space is unlikely to be a concern, it can be tricky to sift through a mounting pile of messages. Google has tried to address this problem by automatically marking certain messages as “important,” and sorting your mail into five broad categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. There’s also an advanced junk mail filter.
These measures may not be enough for a Gmail account that’s truly bulging at the seams, however, so in this guide, you’ll learn how to sort messages using smart labels, as well as how to mass delete and filter unwanted content. We’ll also show you how to mark all emails as read, and archive older content. Plus, you’ll learn advanced search techniques, such as looking at mail received before a certain date. 1 UNSUBSCRIBE AND REPORT Gmail [ Image A] helpfully sorts your incoming emails into separate categories. There are three tabs overall—Primary, Social, and Promotions—and Google automatically organizes your emails, depending on what it believes the content of the messages is related to. Normal and important emails fall under Primary, any social media or forum notifications fall into Social, and advertising or commerce-related emails fall into Promotions. Click through the Promotions and Social sections, and unsubscribe to any content that you no longer want to see. Gmail does its best to protect you from junk. 2 USE LABELS Labels are a powerful way to manage your messages. They act like traditional email folders in that you can drag messages into a certain category— “Vacation 2018,” for example. To do that, click the dropdown menu in the left-hand column, and select “Create new label.” Then enter the field name you wish to use. You can even have sub-labels within labels, and use them to divide things up. To do this check the “Nest label under” box, and then choose from the drop-down where you want the new label to be placed [ Image B].
3 BASIC FILTERING Labels can be very handy, but it’s a nuisance categorizing emails each time they come in. Fortunately, Gmail can apply filters. Click the drop-down menu in the search bar, then enter the details you want to find in the emails (including who it’s from, who the email was to, and even words used within the email), then hit “Create filter” [ Image C]. Once here, you can choose what to do to the messages, including applying the label, categorizing them, or even just searching for them.
4 ADVANCED FILTERS Gmail can do more than just label messages from a specific sender. This can be useful if, for example, you want to find credit card statements sent from your bank, but aren’t interested in the marketing messages it sends out. To get started, create a new filter, as outlined in the previous step, but this time fully explore the options—you can filter by the subject of the email using the “Subject” field, for example [ Image D].
5 MASS-DELETE EMAILS If you’ve found a message you want to delete, Gmail can help you delete others like it. Use the search bar to do this. You can find emails from specific senders—“from: sales@ marvinsmagic_ pills.xyz,” for example. Next, check the box at the top-left, then hit the trash icon at the top of the screen to delete all of the emails from that particular sender [ Image E]. If you mess up, don’t worry, it’s not all lost. Your deleted emails simply sit in your “Bin” section of Gmail for 30 days before they are permanently deleted.
6 BLOCK UNWANTED EMAILS Deleting unwanted messages makes your inbox tidier, but doesn’t prevent the sender from emailing you again in the future. Luckily, Gmail has a feature for blocking unwelcome emails: Open any email from an undesirable sender, choose the drop-down option beside the “Reply” button, then click “Block” [ Image F]. Blocked senders appear under the “Filters and blocked addresses” Gmail setting.
7 MARK ALL MESSAGES AS READ Gmail automatically displays the number of unread messages beside your inbox. As junk mail mounts, it’s hard to keep track of important messages. To reset your unread message count to zero, check the “Select all” box (top-left), then click the three dots on the far right of it to open the drop-down menu. Next, click “Mark as read” [ Image G]. If you use category tabs—Primary, for example —you’ll need to do this for each one.
8 ARCHIVE MESSAGES You probably have some emails cluttering up your inbox that are too important to delete. Gmail enables you to archive them—they’re moved from the inbox and stored in “All Mail” instead. Right-click an email you wish to archive from the main inbox (or any tab, for that matter), then select the “Archive” option. You can also do this en masse, by selecting several emails, using the check box, then hitting “Archive” at the top [