How many emails are currently in your gmail inbox? If you’re like most users, you’re forced to sigh every time you log in. there are hundreds or even thousands of emails crammed into your inbox. Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew how to clean gmail quickly and easily?
If you don’t have a clear gmail organization system, or if you haven’t always been vigilant about the hygiene of your inbox, this can be extremely overwhelming. Fortunately, there is a simple 10-step process you can follow to clean up your gmail inbox.
what does it mean to “clean” your gmail inbox?
“Cleaning” an inbox usually means removing items you no longer need and setting up a structure that allows you to minimize the presence of unnecessary email in the future. There are several advantages to this approach:
- reduce storage. By default, Google will give you 15GB of storage space, and you may have access to more if you’re paying for an account. when you first sign up, this seems like a lot, but eventually, you can exceed this limit. cleaning out your inbox will create more space, giving you more storage to work with.
- cuts the noise. when your inbox is cluttered with messages that don’t matter, it can be hard find exactly the message you’re looking for by searching gmail, or know, at a glance, what your current workload is. cleaning your inbox allows you to eliminate this noise, so you can better focus on the work that really matters.
- minimize incoming junk. part of your gmail cleanup exercise will focus on minimizing the number of incoming spam messages you receive from unwanted or unimportant sources, including email blocking; this way you’ll be less distracted by notifications throughout the day and your inbox will stay clean for longer.
- check unseen messages. clear an inbox input is also a great opportunity to find important messages that you may have missed; Are there any people you forgot to reply to or threads that were closed prematurely?
tools to help clean gmail
gmail has a ton of built-in tools and features that you can use to clean up your own inbox, and I’ll cover some of them in the next 10-step program.
One of the best features is its intuitive search function, which you can use to sort your inbox as you see fit and identify exactly the right messages to delete them as quickly as possible. There are also built-in sorting and categorizing features that can help you organize important messages that remain (and better classify incoming messages in the future).
However, if that’s not enough, you can look to third-party tools to help you search, sort, organize, and delete the messages in your inbox. one of my personal favorites is clean.email, a bulk email cleaner that lets you define your own rules and filters to apply to your inbox. With just a few clicks, you can set a new set of criteria for your inbox organization and start tidying up your email inbox.
For example, with the “quick clean” feature, clean.email will recommend old emails, miscellaneous notifications, and other emails that need to be deleted. With the “Smart Unsubscribe” feature, you can quickly see the sales and marketing email lists you’re subscribed to and permanently unsubscribe from them. You can also use the “auto clean” feature to automatically get rid of emails that meet certain criteria.
Regardless of the tools you choose to help you get the job done, it’s best to clean your email inbox in batches, especially if you haven’t cleaned your inbox for a long time. Instead of trying to make your inbox perfect in the span of an afternoon, set aside just 15 minutes a day to put a dent in your backlog of unclassified messages.
It will be much less overwhelming and will set you up for a positive organizational habit that you can use in the future.
how to clean gmail in 10 steps
If your gmail inbox is cluttered, overwhelming, or just plain poorly organized, try these steps to clean up your gmail inbox:
1. remove large attachments.
start by removing emails that include large attachments; These are likely to take up a disproportionate amount of space in your inbox, reducing your available Gmail storage. there is an easy way to do this in gmail itself. click the dropdown arrow on the right side of the search bar and you will be presented with a list of advanced search criteria.
check the “size” line and select “greater than”, then define a specific size; I like to start by looking for emails that are larger than 1mb (see our post on gmail attachment size limit). You can also check the “has an attachment” box to include only emails that include an attachment. click search when ready and it will generate a list of all emails with especially large attachments. if there are attachments you need to save, consider saving them elsewhere and removing them from your inbox.
2. remove entire categories.
gmail offers a number of “categories” that you can use to organize your inbox. When enabled, Gmail will automatically detect incoming emails that meet these category criteria and sort them appropriately. By default, you’ll see a main category tab, as well as tabs for promotions and social media (social media notifications). go to the settings menu and click on the inbox tab; here, you will have the option to add or remove categories. you can add tabs for updates and forums if you want.
I recommend that you use all the categories that are relevant to your inbox. when you’re ready to clean up, you can visit one of these tabs and delete all emails associated with it; in the upper left corner, click the box to select all messages. by default, it will select all messages in the current view. go to the top of the screen and click the notice to select all the conversations in the tab and delete them all at once.
3. unsubscribe from nuisance lists.
Most of us get at least a few emails every day from lists we subscribed to a long time ago but are no longer relevant, or maybe we ended up on a list we never subscribed to in the first place. . there is a simple solution: unsubscribe. but most of us don’t take the extra time to remove ourselves from these lists; instead, we just delete emails one at a time and roll our eyes every time we get a new one.
stop the cycle by using a tool (such as clean email) to generate a list of all your current subscriptions, or use the gmail search bar to find all emails that include the word “unsubscribe” in the Body. It will take some time to manually unsubscribe from all these lists, but it’s worth the investment.
4. block spam senders.
Next, consider blocking any spammers that flood your inbox. Are there any persistent salespeople who just won’t leave you alone? consider blocking them. Do you get inundated with notifications from one of your project management platforms? Sign in and change your settings so you don’t get as many messages from this one anymore. here is a guide on how to block emails in gmail.
5. remove by sender.
Efficiently cleans your inbox by searching for senders that no longer matter. For example, are there any clients you no longer work with? would you be interested in removing all posts that come from a specific platform, like linkedin? if so, click the dropdown arrow on the right side of the gmail search bar. In the “from” field, type the email address of the sender you want to remove.
You can modify your search with additional criteria if needed, or search for multiple senders at once, then click search to generate a full list of emails that meet these requirements. from there, you can delete all of these emails at once.
6. delete by date.
again, you can head to gmail’s advanced search mode to search for emails that meet certain criteria. this time, try sorting by date. after all, do you really need the emails you received 5 years ago? search for emails within a certain period of time from a date of your choosing; for example, you can choose to only view emails sent within 1 year of 2011, covering all emails from 2010 to 2012, and delete them all at once.
You can also sort your inbox so that the oldest messages appear first; To do this, hover over the numbers you see in the top right corner. By default “most recent” will be selected, so you will see your most recent messages at the top of your gmail inbox. click “oldest” to reverse this and review the emails based on the oldest entries. You can also use this sorting feature to modify any of your other searches, improving their ranking and organization as you manage your inbox. Check out our guide for more information on how to sort by date in gmail.
7. remove by content.
Are you interested in deleting all emails that deal with a specific topic, or those that include certain words or phrases in the body content? You can use gmail’s advanced search features to find these messages. activate the advanced search function with the drop-down arrow and search for emails that have certain words and phrases in the subject line, or those that have specific words or phrases in the body. use quotes to complete the specific phrases you are searching for.
8. create new tags.
In outlook, users organize emails with the help of a system of folders and subfolders. but in gmail, things work a bit differently; Instead of physically moving an email to a specific folder or trying to copy it across multiple folders, you’ll create labels and assign them as you see fit. in the left pane of gmail, you can scroll down to find and click “create tag”.
here, you will be able to name a tag of your choice and choose whether to “nest” it under a different tag. once created, you can apply this label to any individual message in your inbox and apply multiple labels to a single message. then you will be able to call a tag anytime you want and review all the emails associated with it. it’s an incredibly useful way to organize the valuable emails that remain in your inbox, and you can even use it as part of your automatic filtering system, which we’ll set up in step 10.
9. make use of organization functions.
gmail comes loaded with a number of features intended to make it easy for email users to stay organized. for example, you can mark emails as read or unread to determine their status, use stars to immediately mark valuable emails for long-term retention, and use importance markers to identify emails that still require a response. You can even set additional colors for each organizational feature in Gmail Advanced Settings if you need more options. use them and use them constantly to realize their full value.
10. create new filters.
hopefully at this point your gmail inbox should be mostly clean. but how can you make sure it stays clean indefinitely? obviously you can apply your new organization system consistently to new emails as they arrive, but this can be time consuming and you may not be perfectly consistent with it. instead, it may be better to set up automatic filters for incoming messages.
After performing an advanced search for emails that meet certain criteria (such as containing certain words in the subject line or being sent from a specific sender), you can create a filter for all emails that meet these criteria in the future; From there, you can tell gmail to automatically label them or mark them in a specific way, or even tell gmail to archive the message right away. With the right filters, you can consider your gmail inbox to be almost completely self-cleaning. Be sure to read our full guide on setting up gmail filters for more information.
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