With over 1.2 billion users and 20 percent of the global email client market share, Gmail is easily one of the most popular email services out there. The service started as a limited beta version on April 1, 2004, offering 1 gigabyte of storage space and Gmail users can enjoy up to 15 gigabytes of storage space for free. This article will explain how to clean Gmail inbox, how to delete old emails in Gmail, and how Clean Email inbox cleaner can help.

Why should I clean my Gmail?

With so much free space, it’s no wonder Gmail users sometimes neglect inbox management, never delete old emails, and rarely will unsubscribe from newsletters they are no longer interested in. Due to the 15 gigabytes of storage space that all Gmail users can enjoy for free shared across all Google services, including Google Drive and Google Photos, the Gmail inbox can reach its capacity faster than it it seems at the beginning.

When that happens, the natural reaction of most Gmail users is to delete as many old, useless emails as possible. However, Gmail users generally find that deleting emails in bulk is easier said than done. The problem is that not all old emails are equally useless. Among the banner ads, social media notification emails, and multiple one-time confirmation emails are old bank statements, multiple account login credentials, and personal and work-related messages. To avoid deleting anything valuable, Gmail users have to manually select each email they want to delete and go through thousands of emails page by page, which can take hours and days.

Fortunately, there are ways to systematically approach Gmail cleanup and even automate it entirely. Let’s take a closer look at various ways on how to clean Gmail inbox and how to delete Gmail emails without wasting your precious time and how to keep it clean and clutter free using an automatic Gmail cleaning app.

How to clean Gmail storage?

Now that you know that your Gmail storage space is shared across all Google services, you are probably looking forward to learning how to clean Gmail storage like deleting Gmail emails.

But before we get started on the best way to clean up Gmail, we recommend that you first take a look at how much space you have left, which you can do by going to drive.google.com/settings/storage on a computer. Look under Storage Details to see a breakdown of your Gmail storage usage on Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. This is how you can check your Gmail storage.

If you see, for example, that you couldn’t have exceeded Gmail’s storage space limit because this service provider barely uses storage space, you should turn your attention to Google Drive and Google Photos, which are often the biggest hoarders of free Gmail storage space.

On the other hand, if you don’t use Google Drive or Google Photos, then there is no reason for you to spend time learning how to clear Gmail Google Drive storage and remove unwanted photos and videos from your Google Photos collection.

1. Clean Google Drive and Photos

First of all, you need to find out how much space you use on Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Log into your Gmail account and go to the Google Drive storage page. Click “View Details” on a pie chart to see the breakdown of storage by platform.

Total storage

If the majority of your Google Drive space is being taken up by Google Photos, go to Settings and make sure the upload size is selected as “High Quality” instead of “Original”.

High quality photos

The quality of the photos will be smaller than the original resolution and Google will give you unlimited storage. If a photo is larger than 16MP, it will be resized to 16MP. Videos above 1080p will be resized to 1080p high definition. A video with 1080p or less will look almost like the original.

If you want to clean up your Google Drive, go to https://drive.google.com/#quota in your browser. You will get the list of your files, starting with the largest at the top. However, not everything on Google Drive counts toward your storage limit. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and files in “Shared with me” do not take up space. Once you’ve deleted the files you don’t need, make sure to empty the Trash folder. Otherwise, the file will remain there occupying your space.

2. Delete huge emails

Wondering which emails are taking up space in your Gmail mailbox? So, you need to log into your account and follow our instructions:

• Click the downward triangle on the right side of the search bar to display the search options.
• In the lower half of the pop-up window there should be an option titled “Size.” Make sure the first field next to it says “greater than” and the last field says “MB”.
• Enter the desired email size in the middle field.
• Click Search.
• Large emails

Since the average size of an email file is approximately 75 KB, we recommend that you filter all emails larger than 1 MB. That way, you won’t waste your time on small emails that contain no more than a few lines of text, but you can easily capture all emails with at least large attachments.

If Gmail finds too many emails larger than 1MB, you can always increase the size filter to further narrow your search results. Gmail Mail allows its users to receive files up to 50MB in size and send files up to 25MB in size, so keep these two numbers in mind when using the size filter.

3. Use Categories

Gmail automatically classifies your emails on different inbox tabs, such as Social or Promotions. You can find them by clicking the gear button in the upper right corner, then Settings> Inbox.

Categories

You can easily delete all emails in the “Promotions” category, which contains marketing emails and newsletters that you are subscribed to. However, before deleting everything in the “Promotions” or “Social” category, we recommend that you first make sure that there are no important messages in that category. If the category does not contain anything important, feel free to click “All” in the selection menu in the upper left corner. A yellow pop-up will appear above the category tabs indicating that only conversations on this page were selected.

Delete promotions

Since the Gmail categories are quite limited, you should consider using a dedicated Gmail cleaner app, such as Clean Email, to group your messages according to their type, purpose, and other characteristics.

With the Smart Views feature of the app, you can instantly view all dead-end emails, emails older than a month, unread emails, bounce notifications, emails you’ve sent to yourself, and much more. You can then apply a certain action to an entire group of messages or decide the destination of each one individually.

To clean Gmail inbox with Smart Views feature:

• Go to: https://app.clean.email
• Login with your address and password.
• Select any available Smart View in the left pane (such as Mailing Lists).
• Apply any action to a group or a single message.

4. Block spam senders and unsubscribe from marketing emails

If you get a lot of promotions, cleaning up Gmail and achieving zero inbox messages won’t be an easy task unless you unsubscribe from spam emails. The unsubscribe mechanism for cleaning Gmail is usually very simple. Just open the email, scroll down and click the link to unsubscribe. This link is usually very small to avoid accidental clicks. If it takes you too long to find it, press CTRL + F and look for the term “unsubscribe” in the body of the email.

Unsubscribe

If looking for links to unsubscribe, which may or may not be included in spam newsletters in the first place, sounds like a lot of work, then you should use a Gmail unsubscriber. Clean Email’s Gmail unsubscribe feature is a great option because it automatically captures all unsubscribed newsletters, allowing you to re-subscribe in the future with a simple click.

To unsubscribe from spam marketing messages like unsubscribing from Gmail using the Gmail unsubscribe app:

• Go to: https://app.clean.email
• Login with your address and password.
• Select Unsubscriber from the list of options on the left.
• Click the Unsubscribe button next to each address from which you no longer wish to receive messages.
• That’s how easy it is to unsubscribe from unwanted marketing newsletters using Clean Email’s Gmail unsubscribe.

However, professional spammers will continue to send you unsolicited emails even after clicking the link to unsubscribe or unsubscribe with Clean Email’s Gmail unsubscriber. Furthermore, clicking on a fake link is equivalent to notifying the spammer that your email address is in use. Therefore, you need to be very careful not to click unsubscribe from email links that may come from non-legitimate senders and appear to be real spam. Instead, you can easily create rules to block a fully qualified domain name that spammers are using.

You will need to:

Click on the downward facing triangle on the right side of the search bar. Write the domain name in From. Click on the option “Create filter with this search” located in the lower right corner.
Create filter
Check the “Delete” option to automatically delete all emails from the desired domain name. Click Create Filter.
Delete it

5. Delete all emails from senders that don’t interest you

Gmail has been around since 2004, which means that many of its early users, who were still in college when they enrolled, now have children of high school age. If you’ve been using Gmail for a long time, you’ve probably racked up hundreds and thousands of emails from senders that you no longer care about.

Why save emails from social media that no longer exist or from people you haven’t seen in the last 10 years when deleting them takes just a few minutes? With wildcards, you can easily find all emails from previous senders so you can empty Gmail inbox even if you don’t know their exact email addresses.

In Gmail inbox, the wildcard is the asterisk (*) and it serves as a placeholder for other characters. Suppose you want to delete all emails from Myspace, and you don’t care if they are from other Myspace users, Myspace support, or the social network itself.

Instead of searching a lot of emails from user@myspace.com, support@myspace.com, and email@myspace.com, you can use the asterisk followed by the domain name (like this: *@myspace.com), and Gmail will show all emails from myspace.com.

6. Get rid of old emails

Gmail offers its users plenty of storage space for email and attachments, which has a downside: some users never delete their old emails, allowing them to keep piling up until they run out of available storage space and can’t receive no new email.

If this bad habit sounds familiar to you, the best thing to do is to stop treating old emails as precious love letters from a tragically deceased lover and just get rid of them. If you haven’t had the urge to open an email for several years, chances are you never will, then why allow you to steal valuable email storage space?

Here’s what to do to delete Gmail emails and get rid of old emails:

Login in your account.
Click on the search bar.
Type “before: [date]” (replace [date] with an actual date) and hit enter.
This search option tells Gmail to find all emails sent or received before the specified date and to display them. Instead of a full date, you can also specify the year. A good rule of thumb is how to delete all Gmail emails that are older than five years without opening them first. You should also be sure to delete all emails that are older than 1 year, but caution is advised.

7. Create custom email filters

Those who receive a lot of emails on a daily basis need to clean their Gmail inbox regularly to prevent them from piling up and gradually becoming unmanageable. If the idea of ​​having to regularly clean your Gmail inbox doesn’t seem too appealing to you, we recommend that you learn how to create filters in Gmail to automate certain time-consuming email management tasks.

This is how you can create Gmail filters:

• Open Gmail on a computer and log into your account.
• Click the down arrow in the search box at the top.
• Enter your filter criteria.
• Click Create filter.
• Choose what you want the filter to do.
• Click Create filter again.

As you can see, creating Gmail filters is somewhat clunky because you have to first define which emails you want to filter and then specify what you want to happen to new messages that match your criteria. Clean Email’s automatic cleanup feature allows you to perform both steps with one click, allowing you to apply any action to all future emails.

To create custom email filters with Clean Email’s automatic cleanup feature:

• Go to: https://app.clean.email
• Login with your address and password.
• Select Inbox and choose the message you want to base your filter on.
• Apply any available action to the message.
• Choose the option “Selected emails and similar futures” when asked to confirm the action.

8. Organize emails with Gmail labels

You can think of labels as a more versatile alternative to binders. While a single message can belong to a single folder, it can have an unlimited number of tags assigned.

The most important advantage of tag-based email systems like Gmail is that they make it easy to dynamically organize email messages based on your personal preferences. And since Gmail labels can be color-coded, they reduce inbox clutter by making it more scannable.

Here’s how to add labels in Gmail:

Open Gmail on your computer and log into your account.
Scroll down the left panel until you see More. Click there.
Click Create New Label and give it a name.
Click Create.
Now you can add the newly created label to any email by simply clicking the Label As button and selecting it.
Keep in mind that you can assign multiple labels to a single message, so make the most of this useful feature as it can make it easier to use Gmail’s cleanup tools.

Start using an app to clean up Gmail

Considering how long it takes to clean Gmail inbox manually, there must be a better alternative to clean Gmail, right? A powerful email cleaning app is the best way to keep mailboxes organized. Many of us receive tons of new emails on a regular basis, and it is stressful to know that we may be missing the really important things among the less significant information. The best Gmail cleaning apps will help you simplify your email management and thus your digital life. Some apps let you turn your inbox into a to-do list, others feature smart filtering and automatic cleaning.

We recommend Clean Email as the most intuitive and powerful application for cleaning Gmail and other email services. Clean Email eliminates the hassle associated with manual inbox cleaning by helping you group, delete, tag, and archive emails in your Gmail account. In just a few clicks, you can group emails by size, age, or sender. By using smart rules and filters, it is possible to separate unread emails from starred emails, social media subscriptions and notifications from financial emails, emails you have replied to from emails you have sent to yourself, and much more.

Clean Email

To clean Gmail using Clean Email, you don’t even have to pay money. Clean Email can be used for free to clean up to a thousand emails, and unlimited cleaning starts at just $ 9.99 per month, which is extraordinary considering how much time this Gmail cleaner can save.

With any email cleaning app, there is always the question of trust and security. In order for any Gmail email cleaner to be able to clean old messages, it must give you your permission to access your inbox. However, not all cleaners require the same level of trust.

Some, like Clean Email, only scan email headers that contain the subject line, sender and recipient information, dates, email size, and similar metadata, while others also access the email content. to the content of the attachments. Clean Email removes all registered user data from its servers after 24 hours as an additional security measure. The connection between Clean Email and your Gmail account is protected by 128-bit encryption and an authentication protocol called OAuth2.

Clean Email users never have to wonder how to clean Gmail, because the application is so well designed that it is immediately obvious how to use all of its features.