How to clear your Gmail inbox by quickly deleting old emails

If you have a lot of emails in your Gmail account, it may finally be time to clean them up. It is not just about reaching the “zero inbox” Zen nirvana, but facing an imminent threat: as of June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policy. By default, Gmail users receive 15 GB of storage, shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Some data, such as Photos, are currently exempt – but that will go away in June. If the total data exceeds your free quota, you will have to delete the data, pay Google for more storage, or risk losing any “extra” data that Google decides to delete.

Don’t let that happen! Here are some tactics for deleting too many emails, right away.

How to quickly delete old email in Gmail

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

First, you need to know how much storage capacity your email is taking up. If you scroll down to the bottom of the 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 divides into Gmail, Photos and Drive. (Tip: You can block automatic uploads from Google Photos to help manage your storage.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

Now, let’s start deleting.

The easiest way to delete unwanted emails from Gmail is to use Google’s integrated section tabs in Gmail, which already filter the email into several sections: your Main tab (your main inbox), followed by Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. The message implied here is that Google already considers the email stored in its Main tab to be the email you really need–everything else can probably be sacrificed.

I usually clear everything on my Promotions tab first – it’s almost-but-not-exactly-spam. Take a last look at some pages to make sure you want to do a general cleaning. (If you want to delete the email selectively, skip to the section below.)

To start the process, first click on the Specials tab (the label will appear as a color instead of gray). Then, in the range of icons above the tabs, click on the small checkbox icon on the left, like this:

Melissa Riofrio / IDG

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

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

Mark Hachman / IDG

You can then touch the Delete or click on the small trash can icon in the menu banner above to delete all email. You will receive a small pop-up titled “Confirm bulk action”, notifying you that “this action will affect all … conversations in the inbox” and asking if you want to continue. If you do, click OK.

Congratulations! All of your promotions emails have been deleted … sort of. Yes, your email is not over yet. Gmail simply moved it to the Trash, another category that can be accessed via the left navigation trail. (Scroll down and click Most to reveal the Trash and Spam folders.) Click Trash to see all of your deleted emails, waiting to be deleted.

Mark Hachman / IDG

By default, Google gives you 30 days before automatically deleting the email that has been moved to the Trash. This gives you 30 days to search and save an email that you accidentally trashed, but still leaves your Google One’s total storage quota unchanged. (You can highlight the email (or emails) and click on the small icon in the “Move to” folder to move them back to the Inbox if you have discovered an email you want to save.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

If you want, you can click on the Empty Trash now message at the top of your Trash email list to delete all of these emails once and for all. This will reduce your storage quota – but there is no going back now. (Unfortunately, you cannot see how much storage capacity all the email accumulated in the Trash folder takes up.) After you manually delete those emails, they disappear forever!

You can now decide whether you want to delete the email on other Gmail tabs as well. I usually find email notifications in my “Forums” folder unnecessary and I usually do the same with my Social tab as well. The Updates tab usually hides messages from applications and other services that I think are important, so I don’t usually delete these emails without further consideration and additional filtering.

How to filter emails in Gmail

Filtering, you say? Yes, absolutely. The Gmail search box at the top of the screen will do more than just search for keywords. You can use search filters for all kinds of things to help eliminate unnecessary emails, and Google lists a number of them on its Gmail search support page.

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

• before: Apr 18, 2018 This returns all emails in the folder sent before April 18, 2018.
• old_than: 2m This displays all emails older than two months. You can change the “m” for “y” (year) or “d” (day). Notice that latest that can also be used.
• Has attachment Any email with attachments.
• file name: pdf Any email with a PDF file as an attachment.
• Size:
• larger:
• smaller: Or Size: or larger: can be used to find messages larger than a certain size in bytes. Here, you can use greater: 100 for a message longer than 100 bytes or larger: 15M for a message larger than 15 megabytes.

Others, such as from: eliza (email from Eliza) or is important (for email listed as Important), it can also be useful.

Hopefully, these tools will allow you to keep your Gmail inbox at a manageable size. Happy hunting!