How to Chop Down a 20,000 Email Inbox to Zero in 30 Minutes
The Bloated Gmail Inbox
Between promotions, newsletters, notifications, and everything else that comes flying into your inbox every day, it’s very easy to accumulate too many emails. If you don’t have time to deal with it, you could find yourself sitting on an inbox with upwards of 20 to 30 thousand messages.
Toss Out the Trash
It should go without saying that you need to take out the trash often, not only at home but in your Gmail inbox as well.
Click on your Trash in the left navigation bar, click the “select all” box at the top of the message list, and then click on the “All conversations” link listed before the first email.
Then click on Delete Forever.
Next, go after Gmail spam. In the navigation field, click on the Spam link, and then click on “Delete all spam messages now”.
Feels good, right? We haven’t really put a dent in the inbox yet, but it’s a great feeling to start cleaning your inbox after you’ve taken out the trash.
Now for the next level of low hanging fruit.
Social and Promotions
If you’re using Google’s default style Gmail inbox, then you’ll see Social and Promotion tabs at the top of your inbox.
Click on each of these and scroll down through the list looking for large volumes of duplicates.
These are the culprits that are filling up your inbox every day.
When you find them, open the email and find the Unsubscribe link near the top or bottom of the email.
Once you’ve unsubscribed from the most common emails, click on the Select All icon at the top again, and click on the “Select all conversations” link at the top.
Click the trash icon to delete them all.
Back-Up Important Labeled Emails
Luckily, it’s very easy to back up all those emails in bulk using Google’s account export feature.
Google offers a Download Your Data page for every service in your Google account.
Click on Manage Archives link, and then click on Create New Archive.
Scroll down to your list of accounts and click Select None to deselect all accounts.
Then scroll down to your Gmail account, and click the switch to enable that service only.
Click the dropdown arrow, and click on Select labels.
Go down the list of labels you’ve created in your Gmail account, and select all of the ones you want to take a full backup of.
Under the list, you can select the compressed file format and the max archive size.
Finally, click the Create Archive button.
Delete Labeled Emails and Labels
Back in your Gmail inbox, click on each label so the emails display, and select All from the select list.
Remember to select all conversations as you did before.
Click the trash icon to delete all of those emails.
If you’re lucky, you’ll come across labels with thousands of emails you can clean out of your inbox now that you have a backup.
Once you’ve cleaned out all of the emails, don’t forget to delete all those old labels. Just click the dropdown on the right side of the label name and choose Remove label from the list.
At this point, you should have already chopped down the size of your inbox significantly. But let’s not hold back. We’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeves.
Delete Old Emails
If you have tens of thousands of emails, the odds are pretty good that even the emails that used to be important four or five years ago aren’t very important anymore.
Now’s the time to really dig deep and clean house. Let’s get rid of those very old emails.
To do this, just type “older_than:2y” in the Gmail search field. You can set any time limit you want by changing 2 to whatever number of years of the email you’d like to keep.
Just remember that whatever volume of emails you “keep”, you’re going to have to sort through at the end to pull out the truly important ones. So make this timeframe as small as you’re comfortable with.
Select All emails, and select all conversations, then click the Trash icon just like you’ve been doing all along.
After that, your email inbox of tens of thousands should be getting down into at last the single thousands by this point.
At this point, it’s time to take a slightly more selective approach to clean up the remaining mess.
Clean, Sort, and Organize
First, consider that any email you haven’t actually opened beyond a couple of weeks ago, you’re probably never going to open.
You can quickly clean those up by searching for all unread emails older than ten days.
In the search field, just type “is: unread older_than:10d”.
Select and delete all of those listed emails.
Another approach to trim down the remaining list of emails even further is to search for typical spam or promotional subject lines. You can do this by typing searches like “subject: deal”, “subject: giveaway” or “subject: last chance”.
Every search should turn up well over 100 emails at a time. Just keep wiping them out.
