How to clean your Gmail inbox by quickly deleting old emails

If you have too many emails in your Gmail account, it may finally be time to clear them. This is not just to reach the Zen-like nirvana of “inbox zero”, but to address a looming threat: Google will change its storage policy from June 1, 2021. Gmail users receive a standard 15 GB of storage shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Some data, such as Photos, is currently released – but it will go away in June. If your total data exceeds your free allotment, you will need to delete data, pay Google for more storage, or you may lose the “extra” data that Google prefers to delete.

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

How to quickly delete old emails in Gmail

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

First, you need to know how much storage capacity your email is consuming. If you browse the bottom of your Gmail page, you can see how much space all your data takes up – not just Gmail! If you’re a Google One subscriber, your Google One storage page will be listed between Gmail, Photos, and Drive. (Tip: you can block Google Photos’ automatic uploads to help manage your storage.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

Let’s start removing now.

The easiest way to remove junk mail from Gmail is to use Google’s built-in section tabs in Gmail, which filter filters across different 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 stored in your Primary tab to be the email you really need–all the others can probably be sacrificed.

I usually clean everything on my Promotional tab first – it’s almost-but-not-completely-spam. Take a look at the last few pages to make sure you want to do a wholesale. (If you want to selectively delete emails, go to the section below.)

First click on the to start the process Promotions tab (the label will be as a color rather than gray). Then click on the ribbon of the icons above the tabs on the small tick icon on the far left:

Melissa Riofrio / IDG

It should highlight all the emails you see on the first page of the Promotion tab – not every one you have in Gmail.

After selecting the emails from the page, Google confirms your choice – and offers you the option to select all the emails on the Promotions tab by clicking on the blue-marked message as shown below:

Mark Hachman / IDG

You can then tap Delete key or click on the small trash can icon in the menu ribbon above to delete all the emails. You will see a small pop-up titled ‘Confirm Bulk Action’, warning that ‘this action will affect all … conversations in Inbox’ and ask if you want to continue. If you do, click OK.

Congratulations! All your Promotions email address has been deleted … sort of. Yes, your email is not completely gone yet. Gmail simply moved it to the Trash, one of the categories accessible via the left navigation bar. (Scroll down and then click More to view the Trash and Spam directory.) Click Trash can to see all your deleted emails, waiting to be deleted.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Google gives you a default 30 days before it automatically deletes spam that has been moved to the Trash. It gives you 30 days to retrieve and save any email you accidentally trash – but it leaves your total Google One storage allowance unchanged. (You can highlight the email address (or emails) and click on the small “Move to” folder icon to move it back to the Inbox if you have discovered an email address that you want to save.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

If you want, you can click Empty trash now message at the top of your trash mail list to delete all the emails once and for all. This will lower your storage allocation – but there is no going back now. (Unfortunately, you can not see how much storage capacity all the accumulated e-mail in your trash file takes up.) Once you have manually deleted the e-mail, it’s gone forever!

Now you can decide if you want to delete emails in other Gmail tabs as well. I usually view email notifications in my “Forums” folder as expenses, 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, which is why I do not delete emails frequently without consideration and further filtering.

How to filter emails in Gmail

Filtering, you say? Yes of course. The Gmail search box at the top of your screen can do more than just search for keywords. You can use search filters for all sorts of things to eliminate unnecessary email address, and Google lists some of them on its Gmail support page.

Here are some commands that are especially helpful in reducing the storage space your inbox consumes, listed below. Simply type in bold text in the Gmail search box.

• before: 18/04/2018 It returns all emails in the folder sent before April 18, 2018.
• parent_dan: 2m It shows all emails older than two months. You can swap the ‘m’ for ‘y’ (year) or ‘d’ (day). Note that nuwer_ as can also be used.
• it: appendix Any email with attachments.
• file name: pdf Any email with a PDF file as an attachment.
• size:
• bigger:
• smaller: Or size: or bigger: can be used to find messages larger than a certain size in bytes. Here you can use larger: 100 for a message greater than 100 bytes, or larger: 15M for a message larger than 15 megabytes.

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

Hopefully, with these tools, you can keep your Gmail mailbox at a manageable size. Happy hunting!