I’ve used my main Gmail account for about 20 years now, and I’m quite proud of how I’ve maintained it. My inbox isn’t overflowing with unread emails, my storage has never been full, and I’ve set up hundreds of filters to directly send useless emails right to the trash. I don’t use any third-party tools to tame that chaos, and I’m here to share all the hacks I’ve set up to keep my Gmail inbox under control.
Manage email subscriptions to tame your inbox chaos
You should start clearing out your inbox by looking at all of your email newsletter subscriptions. In the past, I’ve been guilty of subscribing to way too many newsletters and cluttering my inbox. What started out as a great way to read interesting things has ended up as yet another chore that I just cannot keep up with. At some point, you’ve got to let those unread newsletters go. You can start by manually unsubscribing from the newsletters you’re not going to read. Alternatively, you can move these subscriptions to a different email address, so you can keep one inbox just for reading.
You can also try using read-later apps to receive and read your newsletters. I’m using Readwise Reader these days, and it’s allowed me to read so much more than I did when these emails were ending up in my email inbox. If your problem is that you’re subscribed to too many promotional emails that are basically junk, then you can also consider using Gmail’s built-in tools to unsubscribe from promotional mailing lists.
Use as many filters as you can
Gmail has powerful filters that can automatically delete unwanted emails. Yes, you can select a bunch of emails and click the Report spam button to get rid of them. This moves those emails to spam, but I’ve sometimes seen recurring emails from the same sender still finding their way into my inbox, even after doing this. So I’ve started using Gmail’s filters to banish repeat spammers to the trash. You can do this by selecting a bunch of unwanted emails from different senders you don’t want to hear from anymore, and then clicking the three-dots button in Gmail’s web view. Then, choose Filter messages like these, and Gmail will automatically populate the filter list with all those senders. Select Search, and on the next pop-up, check Delete it, and Also apply filter to matching conversations. Finally, select Create filter.
This will automatically move all emails from those senders to trash, and prevent more of their emails from ending up in your inbox.
Search filters are your best friend
When your inbox is already full, or close to it, you should try a few search filters to spot the emails occupying the maximum amount of space in your inbox. The most useful one is the “Size” filter. For instance, in Gmail’s search bar, you can type Size:20m, and the results will zero in on emails above 20mb in size. Replace the number with 15, 10, or any other number, and it’ll show you emails above that size. You can back up these emails if they have anything useful in them, and if not, you can go ahead and delete them all.
Use advanced search to find junk mail
I am quite embarrassed to admit that when I was younger, I sent all my friends and family members way too many forwards. My inbox still has forwards from that time, quite a few of which I’d also sent to over 50 people in one go. I may have been responsible for a lot junk mail, but it’s never too late to atone for your sins. If you click the three lines icon to the right of the search bar in Gmail, you’ll see the service’s advanced search options. You can use those options to look for emails from specific date ranges and get rid of ancient clutter that’s no longer useful (after you’re done cringing, that is). Alternatively, you can just use a search filter to find those emails. Try something like after:2006/1/1 before:2007/1/2 to locate all your emails sent in 2006.
Using advanced search tools is easier than filters, because it doesn’t require you to remember various search operators. It also makes more of those search tools accessible, which makes it a great way to delete old emails from your inbox. If only I could delete them from other people’s inboxes, too.
Attack useless emails at the source
At a certain point, it does get tiring to keep adding filters to your Gmail to keep useless emails away. I strongly recommend looking at the settings menus on various websites to stop the spam at the source. Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are some of the most popular senders of emails nobody asked for. If you go through their communication preferences pages, you’ll be able to stop quite a few of their emails before they ever make it to your inbox. I make it a point to uncheck all emails from every site I sign up for. Once you’ve done that, these sites might still find a way to send you more emails, but you can click the unsubscribe button (usually present next to unwanted emails in the Social or Promotions tabs) to stop them pretty easily, or just use Gmail’s filters to block those emails from ever making it to your eyes.
Teach Gmail which of your emails are important
You can have Gmail help you sort out unwanted emails from your inbox. Next to each email in your inbox, you’ll see a small right-arrow icon. When you see an important email, you can click the arrow icon, which will turn yellow. This marks the email as important, and over time, Gmail will keep those emails in your inbox, and send the rest to other folders.
Delete emails in Spam and Trash folders
Gmail is pretty good at automatically blocking spam, which means that a lot of unwanted emails will end up in your Spam folder. Similarly, if you’ve been following the steps described above, you’ll have a bunch of emails in your Trash folder. This is helpful, but you won’t see any real changes to your Gmail storage space until you clear out all those emails. To do this, manually go to these folders, select all the emails you want to get rid of, and delete them all. Don’t forget to check if you’re deleting any important emails, because emails deleted from these folders cannot be retrieved.
Also be sure to check on these folders at least once a month, because Google will automatically delete any messages that have been sitting in them for more than 30 days.
Clean up Gmail space quickly
Gmail offers an easy built-in way to identify what’s occupying the most space in your inbox. To get started, visit the storage cleanup page and click Clean up space. It’ll show you some suggestions and offer easy ways to clear out the clutter in your Gmail. You just have to follow the on-screen steps to actually go through with it.
Turn important emails into tasks
My colleague David Nield’s tip about turning emails into tasks has helped me a lot. When you open an email, you can click the Add to Tasks button up top, which adds it to Google Tasks, and turns that email into a to-do item. This helps me keep track of emails that would otherwise get lost. This way, I can easily save the most important emails and delete the rest. So much of cleaning up Gmail clutter revolves around active email management, and this tip just helps me quickly get rid of useless emails on a day-to-day basis.
Try using third-party email management services
Normally, I’m loath to recommend third-party services to manage email chaos. This is because using them means you need to give the companies that make them access to your inbox, which is a privacy and security nightmare. However, I’ve previously used SaneBox to help a friend get their inbox down from 50,000 unreads to about 10,000 within a day, while also setting up ways to keep their inbox from getting overloaded again too. It’s been vetted by Google and Leviathan Security Group, which means I can pretty confidently recommend at least this service. Lifehacker’s sister site PCMag also gave Sanebox a glowing review.
You can try the service for free using the 14-day trial. During that time, you can use its email deep clean feature to quickly get rid of a bunch of your unwanted emails.
