How to get rid of the clutter in your Gmail account

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Find out how to sort through the junk in your Google mailbox without losing important information.

In 2004, Gmail, with its gigabyte of free email storage, seemed like a fairy tale. No one would have thought that such a huge box would ever have to be cleaned. Today the repository has grown 15 times, but the desire to delete thousands of letters does not leave many of us.

The problem lies not in the available space, but in the myriad unread and simply unnecessary messages. Checking your inbox becomes torture, and the search and tagging system becomes useless.

However, you can still give your Gmail a second life.

Delete all emails

The first step is to empty the entire mailbox. First, it is advisable to back up the entire mailbox using the Google data export tool. Then it can be opened through an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird. It can take several hours or even days to save a mailbox - it depends on its volume. But the process is carried out on Google servers, so you don't need to keep your computer turned on.

You can also transfer the most useful and necessary messages to another account through desktop mail clients using POP or IMAP protocols.

Be careful! The life hacker is not responsible for important letters that you can inadvertently delete.

By itself, deleting letters is a straightforward process. Go to the Gmail page with all messages, check the corresponding box at the top left and to the right, click "Select all threads in the" All mail "section". After that, all that remains is to click on the basket icon and confirm the action.

Letters will be in the trash can, available in the menu on the left. Go to it and click "Empty Trash". Also check your spam folder to make sure your account is now completely clean.

Delete unnecessary contacts

Gmail automatically records the contacts of the people you correspond with. This is a big plus of the service, but there is also a minus here: if you use the function carelessly, your contact list can turn into a messy heap. Quite unexpectedly, a person to whom you wrote only once, and even then 10 years ago, may appear in the phone book of an Android smartphone.

In this case, everything is a little more complicated than with letters, since contacts are synchronized between various Google services. Ideally, you want to remove any useless email addresses, keep important ones, and leave your phone numbers intact.

Start on the Contacts page, namely the Other Contacts category on the More tab. There are people that Gmail can recommend when entering an email address, but whom you yourself did not add to your contacts. Select all unnecessary people by checking them, click on the icon with three dots at the top right, and then - "Delete". You can also check the Similar Contacts tab for duplicates.

After that, you should manually go through the main contact list and finish what you started. If you want the list to no longer be replenished automatically, go to the "General" tab in the Gmail settings and, opposite the "Auto-complete contacts" item, select the "Do not add contacts automatically" option.

Start from scratch

All that remains is to prepare for the future influx of letters and, if possible, prevent them. Be careful when leaving your mailbox in another dummy service. If it’s too late and your mail is showing up in hundreds of companies, you may want to consider creating a new Google account. If desired, old messages can be migrated using the above mentioned POP and IMAP protocols.

It is important to know that dots are not counted in Gmail email addresses. Letters sent to [email protected] and [email protected] will arrive in the same mailbox. Therefore, when subscribing to not very important services, enter the address with a dot in the same place. So you can quickly sort out various types of mailings and delete them.

It is recommended that you regularly clean your mailbox for letters older than a few months. If you enter older_than: 1y in the search bar, Gmail will show all emails received over a year ago. The same can be done, for example, with months: in this case, you need to replace the letter y with m. Add is: unimportant to your search query to exclude messages marked "Important" from the list. A complete list of search commands is available in the help section.

Gmail does a pretty good job of organizing emails if you set up your inbox. To do this, click on the gear on the right and click on the corresponding button. If the service sends a message to the wrong category, then drag and drop it manually to the desired one: Gmail will remember your choice and will not make mistakes again.