How to clean up your Gmail inbox properly

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?

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.

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.

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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.

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 with this alone.

This article was originally published on March 12, 2025 and republished with slight adjustments.