We all know how it goes: One day you look at your Gmail account and you have several thousand emails. Why should we be surprised? It’s easy to subscribe to dozens of company promotions without realizing it. If you buy something online from a new service or retailer, you become a subscriber. If you want to read an article from a resource that requires registration, you subscribe. If you sign a petition or donate money to a charity, you become a subscriber.
Of course, it’s easy to ignore all those subscriptions and let them pile up on your Gmail Promotions tab. But what if your favorite clothing retailer has a really good sale and you miss it because of other promotional emails? What if you have so many emails in the backlog that they start to erode your Google storage limits? Or what if the thought of having a few thousand promotional emails waiting in your Inbox is just, well, annoying?
Sometimes it’s a good idea to spend some time cleaning up all that extra email from your Gmail account and preventing more from coming in. Here’s how. (Note: All of these require using Gmail with a browser. There is little you can do with your mobile app, these options are listed at the end of this article.)
Unsubscribe or block
Google has actually made it pretty easy to unsubscribe from an email subscription. Emails that are detected as promotional by Google’s AI engine have a small “Unsubscribe” link at the top of the email next to the sender’s name.
Click on the link and you will see a pop-up box with a blue “Unsubscribe” button. Click that and you should soon stop receiving emails from that source. (Note that it may take several days to remove your name from a subscription list.)
Note that there are many spammers who use the “unsubscribe” option to verify that an email account is legitimate; Replying to these can open you up to (no less) increased spam. The best you can do for this score is to use Gmail’s unsubscribe feature only for emails from vendors you know. Any email from your spam tab or that you are not familiar with should be blocked rather than unsubscribed.
To block a sender, open the email, click the three “More” dots in the upper right corner and click “Block”. [vendor name]”
Sometimes (somewhat unpredictably), Gmail’s AI engine will notice that you haven’t opened an email from a certain source in more than 30 days and will pop up to ask you if you want to unsubscribe. In any case, take advantage of it if it does happen.
delete old email
Unfortunately, unsubscribing or even blocking from a list does nothing about the few hundred emails still waiting in your Gmail account. Even if it’s email from a company you love, sometimes you want to get rid of all the old emails that fill your inbox.
There are several ways to get rid of old emails. You can try one of the apps that claim to make it easier to clean up your inbox, but it can be just as easy to do it yourself.
For example, to get rid of an email from a specific sender:
- Type the sender’s name in your search box.
- If the sender’s name is too generic or appears in other emails, open one of those emails, copy the email address and paste it into the search box.
- If you want to make sure that only emails are sent to you, click “From:[sender]” or “From:[email address]instead. You can also click the icon to the right of the search field and use any of these fields to search for the emails you want to delete.
- You should get a list of all the emails you have received from this sender. Click the square box in the upper left corner of your email list. This will check all emails on that page. Then you can click the trash “trash” icon to send all emails to trash.
- If your search list has more than 50 emails, after clicking the small square, at the top of the list, “All 50 conversations on this page have been selected. Select all conversations that match this search.” The second is a link; click that and all emails from that sender will be selected.
- When you click the delete symbol, a typical “Are you sure you want to do this?” Message. If you are sure, go ahead and click “OK”.
If you’re a little nervous about deleting all emails, you can browse the list and uncheck the ones you don’t want to trash; You can also archive contacts you are not sure about to remove them from your inbox. Note that the mail isn’t really gone yet; You have 30 days to go to the Trash (link is in the left column) and restore.
Using the mobile app
There isn’t much you can do using the mobile Gmail app. You can of course open any email and look for the “unsubscribe” link usually found at the bottom of the email.
While the “unsubscribe” tab doesn’t appear in the Gmail mobile app, you can block the sender by opening the email and clicking the three dots in the top right corner and selecting “Block.” [sender name]”
You can delete multiple emails by pressing the icon of each email you want to delete and then selecting the trash icon.
Otherwise, if you’re using a mobile device, you’d better access Gmail via your browser to perform any of these tasks.
Update July 28, 2021, 09:50 AM ET: Two screenshots have been changed to reflect a minor change in Gmail’s interface.
