How to clean up your Gmail inbox by quickly deleting old email
Cleaning your inbox can help you organize your life as well as save money you’d otherwise have to pay to Google for extra storage.
If you have too much email in your Gmail account, it may finally be time to clean it out. This is not simply to reach the Zen-like nirvana of “inbox zero,” but to address a looming threat: As of June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policy ( go. pcworld.com/splc). By default, Gmail users receive 15GB of storage, shared across
Gmail, Drive, and Photos. Some data, like Photos, is currently exempted—but that goes away in June. If your total data exceeds your free allotment, you’ll either have to delete data, pay Google for more storage, or risk losing whatever “extra” data Google chooses to delete. Don’t let that happen! Here are some tactics for deleting lots of email, pronto.
HOW TO QUICKLY DELETE OLD EMAIL IN GMAIL
About the only requirement for purging old emails from Google Gmail is that you must be logged into Gmail and using it on a browser from a Chrome, Mac, or Windows PC, or an Android tablet or ipad. These commands may be available from a smartphone, but they’re designed first and foremost for the web.
First, you’ll need to know how much storage capacity your email is taking up. If you scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail page, you can see how much space all of your data takes up—not just Gmail! If you’re a Google One subscriber, your Google One storage page ( go.pcworld. com/g1sp) breaks it down between
Gmail, Photos, and Drive. (Tip: You can block Google Photos’ automatic uploads to help manage your storage [ go.pcworld. com/gdcp].) Now let’s start deleting.
The easiest way to delete unwanted email from Gmail is to use Google’s built-in section tabs within Gmail, which already filter email into several sections: your Primary tab (your main inbox), followed by Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. The implicit message here is that Google already considers the email that’s stored in your
Primary tab to be the email you actually need— everything else can probably be sacrificed.
I usually purge everything in my Promotions tab first—it’s almost but not quite spam. Take a last look through a few pages to ensure that you want to do a wholesale purge. (If you want to delete email selectively, skip to the section below.)
To begin the process, first click the Promotions tab (the label will show as a color rather than gray). Next, from the ribbon of icons above the tabs, click the small checkbox icon at far left.
This should highlight all of the emails you can see on the first page of the Promotions tab—not every single one of them that you have within Gmail.
After you select that page’s worth of emails, Google confirms your selection—and offers you the option of selecting all of the emails in the Promotions tab, if you click the blue-highlighted message as shown below.
You can then tap the Delete key or click the small garbage-can icon in the menu ribbon above to delete all of the email. You’ll receive a small popup entitled “Confirm bulk action,” warning that “this action will affect all… conversations in Inbox” and asking if you want to continue. If you do, click OK.
Congratulations! All of your Promotions email have been deleted…sort of. It isn’t entirely gone yet. Gmail simply moved it to the Trash, another of the categories that’s accessible via the left navigation rail. (Scroll down and then click More to reveal the Trash and Spam folders.) Click Trash to see all of your deleted email, waiting to be deleted for good.
By default, Google gives you 30 days before it automatically deletes email that’s been moved into the Trash. That gives you 30 days to search for and save an email you accidentally trashed—but it also leaves your total Google One storage allotment unchanged. (You can highlight emails and click the small “Move to” folder icon to move them back to the Inbox if you discovered an email you want to save.)
If you want, you can click the “Empty Trash now” message at the top of your Trash email list to delete all of those emails, once and for all. That will lower your storage allotment— but there’s no going back. (Unfortunately, you can’t see how much storage capacity all of that accumulated email in your Trash folder takes up.) Once you manually delete those emails, they’re gone forever!
Now you can decide if you want to delete email in other Gmail tabs as well. I usually consider email notifications in my Forums folder expendable, and I tend to feel the same way about my Social tab. The Updates tab usually hides messages from apps and other services I consider important, so I don’t often delete those emails without some consideration and further filtering.
HOW TO FILTER EMAILS IN GMAIL
Filtering, you say? Yes, absolutely. The Gmail search box at the top of your screen will do more than just search for keywords. You can use search filters to weed out unnecessary email: Google lists a number of ways to do this on its Gmail search support page ( go. pcworld.com/gspg).
A few commands that are especially useful for reducing the storage space your inbox consumes are listed below. Simply type the bolded text into the Gmail search box and click Search.
• before:04/18/2018 This returns all email in the folder that was sent before April 18, 2018.
• older_than:2m This displays all email that’s older than two months. You can swap the “m” for “y” (year) or “d” (day). Note that you can also use newer_than to look for emails sent after a certain time period or date.
• has:attachment Any email with attachments.
• filename:pdf Any email with a PDF file as an attachment.
• size: and larger: Either size: or larger: can be used to find messages that are larger than a certain size in bytes. You can use
larger:100 for a message that’s larger than 100 bytes, or larger:15m for a message that’s larger than 15 megabytes.
• smaller: Use this to find messages that are smaller than a certain size in bytes.
Other options, such as from:eliza (email from Eliza) or is:important (for email that’s listed as Important), may also be useful.
Hopefully these tools will allow you to keep your Gmail inbox down to a manageable size. Happy hunting!