Managing An Overstuffed Gmail Inbox

Do you ever look at the number of messages stored in your Gmail Inbox?  How many weeks, months or even years does it go back for?  Monday morning, while I was on Paulette’s computer doing a bit of routine maintenance for her, I noticed that her Gmail Inbox had over 28,000 messages!  Has she ever deleted old emails?  I doubt it – most of them are copies of comments left on her quilting blog.

Paulette’s argument against deleting messages in her inbox is that she just might need to search for something.  I asked her “have you ever done that”?  Her answer:  “no, but it doesn’t mean I might not want to sometime”.  Well, I couldn’t argue with that, and if I tried, I’d lose anyway.  Did you know that there’s a pretty simple way to clean out your Gmail Inbox that allows you to either archive or delete old messages.

First, it’s important to understand the difference between deleting an email or archiving it using Gmail.

Archiving mail moves messages out of your Inbox and into your "All Mail" label for safekeeping-- you won't be bothered with extra messages cluttering your inbox, but you'll still be able to find a message if you need it six years from now!

Deleted messages and conversations are permanently removed from Gmail 30 days after you send them to Trash.

Gmail only lets you select and archive/delete a screen’s worth of mail at a time.  That would take forever to archive/delete thousands of emails.  There is a simple way to do this in bulk and the trick is to ‘create a filter’ to select and archive/delete mail older than a date you specify.

A snapshot of my Gmail Account showing I had 3,275 Inbox messages

Let’s look at an example of this to demonstrate how easy it is to create a filter.  In the Image above, my Gmail Inbox shows I had 3,275 messages – way too many!!  What I decided to do is ‘Archive’ all of my emails dated prior to January 1, 2012.  It’s pretty simple and only requires a few steps:

Image 1.  In email, click on the ‘Wrench Icon’ > ‘Settings’

Image 2.  On Settings click on ‘Filter’ >  ‘Create a New Filter’

Image 3. Filter Select Screen displays

When you click ‘Create a Filter’ as shown in Image 2, a new pop-up window will appear.  In the field labeled ‘Has the words’ enter the date that you want to use for archiving – i.e. all emails prior to this date will be archived. The format for this field is:

before:yyyy/mm/dd   so I entered:  before:2012/01/01

Using the above filter all emails in my Inbox dated Dec. 31, 2011 and earlier will be moved to the ‘All Mail’ folder.  So, now I just click on ‘Create filter with this search’ as shown in Image 3 above.

Image 4.

A new window will display and here just check the boxes as shown in Image 4 above and the click on ‘Create Filter’.  Gmail will then proceed to move all the emails that meet the date criteria from your Inbox to the All Mail folder.  A ‘success’ message will be shown when the process is complete.  That’s it.

If you wished to ‘Delete’ your old emails instead of ‘Archiving’ them, you could do this by following exactly the same steps, only in Image 4 above, check the ‘Delete It’ box as we'll and then all your emails would be moved to ‘Trash’ and then permanently deleted in 30 days.

In the image above, it now shows there are only 912 messages in my Inbox.  Where did the others go?  They are now in a folder called ‘All Mail’.  Everyone using Gmail has an ‘All Mail’ folder.  To access it just scroll down past Inbox, Sent Mail, Drafts, Spam, Trash until you come to ‘More’ with a down arrow.  Click the arrow and you’ll see the ‘All Mail’ folder and all of your ‘Archived’ messages.

Have a great Tuesday, and thanks again for visiting!