Almost every internet user, at some point, has created a gmail account. many also use gmail as their primary email provider. If you’ve had your Gmail account for several years, you probably have a lot of old emails that you’ll never read.
You can delete all emails from your gmail inbox, but you may also have some important emails. If you want to delete emails without losing important ones, you can use gmail filters.
You can filter your emails by entering filter queries in the search bar. you can even perform advanced searches or create your own filters. let’s see how.
how to delete old emails before a specific date
If you want to delete all old emails before a specific date, you can use the “before” or “older than” parameters in your gmail.
both filters do a similar job, but the “before” parameter is more specific because it allows you to send emails to the trash can that you received before a specific date. to do this, you can use the following format:
before: yyyy/mm/dd
Let’s say you want to delete all emails received before December 25, 2021. You’ll need to run the following search query:
before:2021/12/25
Alternatively, you can use the “older_than” parameter. again say you want to delete all emails received before 25th dec 2021 on 26th dec 2021. you can use the following search query:
greater_than: 1d
You can use d for days and y for years. however, you cannot use decimal values here and search for 1.5 years. instead, you will need to enter 182 days.
Note that the results of the “before” and “older than” parameters may be different. the “before” parameter also pulls sent emails. however, the “older_than” parameter scans only received emails.
Once you’ve used any of those search queries, you’ll see all emails received before the specified date.
To remove them, select the arrow next to the checkbox in the top left. in the dropdown menu, select the all option. you’ll also see a notification that says select all conversations that match this search at the top. select it and then select the trash can icon at the top to move the emails to your digital trash.
You can also use the same search criteria to search for emails in the Gmail app for Android and Apple mobile devices. when you use an android or an iphone, the only difference is that you will need to select the emails individually because there is no option to select all messages with one touch.
how to delete old emails with tags
labels are the perfect tool to organize emails from gmail users. most people get a ton of emails that they never open. Instead of flipping through the trash, it’s helpful to create labels so that important emails land in that specific label. this way you can bulk delete all irrelevant unread emails.
While you can delete all emails from a label at once, you may not want to delete all emails from your important labels. therefore, you will still need to use a search parameter to remove emails older than a specific date in your important tags.
Let’s say you want to delete emails older than six months in a tag called “customer emails”. here is the parameter you can use:
greater_than:182d tag:client-emails
gmail also creates some tags by default. for example, group emails into categories like social media, updates, promotions, etc. you can replace the tag name in the search parameter to remove old emails from these categories.
Next, select all emails by selecting the arrows next to the empty checkbox in the top right and then selecting all. you’ll also see a notification that says select all conversations that match this search at the top. select it and then hit the delete button to delete all emails.
how to create a new filter to remove old emails
While gmail automatically creates labels like promotions to filter out promotional and other spam emails, you may need to create a filter to remove specific emails.
For example, let’s say you’ve subscribed to several newsletters for a research project. now you moved on to another project, you unsubscribed from the newsletters a year ago when the project ended and now you want to clean up the old messages.
You can do this by creating a filter that filters out emails received a year ago that have the word newsletter in them.
- select the icon with the three lines in the right corner of the search bar to create your filter.
- you will see a list of options to filter your emails. this step requires some logic, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. in the example we’ve used, searching for all emails with the word “newsletter” might do the trick.
However, you also want to filter by date so that the search query returns emails received a year or more ago. Unfortunately, there is no option to create a filter that will give you all emails received a year ago or earlier. the only option you have is to select a time period by inserting values into the date within and date fields.
the good thing is that there is a solution. you can use the “before” parameter on “has the words”, like so:
As you can see, there are many things you can filter including the sender, subject, and date of the email. once you’ve inserted the values, select the search or create filter button if you want to use it later as well.
- Once you have the search results, select the small arrow next to the checkbox in the top left and select all. however, be sure to check that no important emails have slipped into the search results. then press the delete button and voila.
final touch: empty the trash
Even after you’ve deleted old emails, they’ll stay in your trash and take up space. you get 15gb of free storage space on google drive, and if you use google photos, that’s what will probably take up a lot of that space.
A single email doesn’t take up much space. however, attachments take up more space. And when you have thousands of attachments in your gmail, they can take up a significant chunk of your storage space.
Here’s the good news: Gmail automatically deletes everything in the Trash after 30 days. however, if you urgently need to free up space, go to the trash and select the empty trash now option at the top to delete all emails from the trash permanently.
that’s all you need to do to clean old emails from your gmail account. If you are wondering what to do if all the emails in your inbox are important, you can create a new spare gmail account and transfer the emails to that account to free up storage space.