Is there an easy way to delete masses of emails in Gmail?

We often have a problem with unnecessary emails. We think that it will take forever to delete every email as there are already few thousands of them. Usually, people start to delete the email when the storage is full. Don’t worry, in this article, you will learn how to delete thousands of Gmail emails just in a few clicks. The trick is to delete the ones you don’t need and keep the important emails.

Taming Gmail

First of all turn of your talent to use “inbox for dummies”. (You can always use it later). Start from ion to Settings, hit Inbox, and set Inbox type to default. Then untick all Google’s categories: updates, social, forums, primary and promotion. This will help you to see all the real emails. Revise your large categories. It can be newsletters, social updates, forum comments or others. Decide how you will treat them. If you don’t want it, turn it off at the source.

The next question is do you need them to read later or should they be kept as searchable records? If so, in “filters and clocked addresses” tab in settings and create a filter that labels them (Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc) and puts them straight into a “folder” without them ever appearing in your inbox (skip inbox). When you got a filter Gmail can process your emails in the same way. Putting in other words, Archive emails and they will be gone from your inbox.

Be attentive to emails you want to keep. It can include payment confirmation, records of orders, invoices etc. Create Oldmail label and move all unnecessary emails from Inbox there. You can do it by clicking the down arrow in the upper left and selecting All. You will have to “Select all 98, 345 conversations in Inbox” or whatever. Move them to the folder “Oldmail” by selecting all of them. You have now achieved “fake inbox zero” and you can clear out any incoming emails, preferably at a set time every day.

Inbox zero

In July 2017 Merlin Mann propagated the Inbox Zero in Google TechTalk. Mann came up with the creation of the 43Folders system. Those systems worked good enough for many people, but I wasn’t one of them.

I’d rather recommend you Oliver Burkegan's Guardian story, Why time management is ruining our lives. As Mann told once the emails aren’t the technical problem. They are problems of people, and we can’t fix people.

Saving space

When you searched and filtered your mail for a couple of hours, the thousands of emails are probably deleted. But, there still can be the lack of storage. Emails are small if you want to free a lot of space delete emails with attachments. For instance, I had more than 70 emails with 15 MB or larger attachments. I still have 63 emails larger than 10MB and 387 larger than 3MB.

If I delete those it will save me at least 1,5 GB. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't provide the opportunity to delete the attachment and keep the email itself. The only way is to forward it and keep the text. Dittach works on resolving this problem. Choose the best option for yourself to tidy up your Gmail.