Digital spring cleaning How to clean up your Gmail inbox properly
As dirty as the windows of your home are at the end of winter, your digital inboxes are just as full. Time to tidy up and clean. We show you the most efficient methods.
An overflowing inbox is not only an organizational nuisance, it can also cost you money. In the case of Gmail, you have an impressive 15 gigabytes of free storage, but at some point even that reaches its limit. Then you either have to pay or delete it. But what is the best way to do this?
Via the tabs
Probably the easiest way to clear out your Gmail storage is to use the default tabs in your inbox. Google sorts emails into categories such as "Advertising", "Social networks" or "Notifications". The advertising section in particular is often full of unused offers and newsletters, which you can safely remove on a large scale. And this is how it works.
Clean up using the tabs
- Click on the "Advertising" tab.
- Click on the checkbox above the email list - this will mark all emails on this page.
- An option now appears to select all emails in this tab.
- Click on the trash can icon and delete.
The deleted e-mails will initially end up in the recycle bin. They remain there for 30 days before they automatically disappear for good. If you want to free up space immediately, empty the recycle bin manually.
Expert mode - via filter functions
If you still have space problems even without annoying advertising emails, you need to go a little deeper. Certain filters are particularly helpful here, with which you can filter out specific messages. This can be done via the size, for example, or by displaying all messages with attachments.
Below are some of the most useful filters to help you sort your messages more quickly.
Helpful filter functions
- before:05/12/2024: This returns all emails in the folder that were sent before April 12, 2024.
- older_than:2m: This shows all emails that are older than two months. You can replace the "m" with "y" (year) or "d" (day). You can also use newer_than.
- has:attachment: Any email with attachments.
- filename:pdf: Any email with a PDF file as an attachment.
- larger:15M: Shows you all messages that are larger than 15 megabytes.
- from:Sabrina: Filters all messages that you have received from a specific person.
The keyword is "unsubscribe"
And now, of course, there are some very clever mail senders who have somehow managed to cheat their way through the advertising and newsletter filters and are still clogging up the mail inbox somewhere. To track them down, there is often a little magic word that all these unnecessary mails share: "unsubscribe". Certain users have already deleted whole mountains of unwanted emails in no time at all using this function alone.
