3 Methods to effectively clean your Gmail inbox

Recently, I had a problem with full Gmail inbox. I had this problem before and took sometimes to get rid of even 1GB. Today I found another effective solution and would like to share with others as well as with myself in the future.

The best method would be to subscribe to extra storage. It’s relatively cheap and gives you instant storage boost. However, I am already paying for storage in iCloud. So I am not ready to invest more in other cloud storage.

Extra storage pricing for Gmail

Note that the methods I mention in this article should be done in Gmail website which has easier UI to remove stuffs, not Google Inbox. For those that are using Google Inbox, there is a link on the left side of your Inbox screen which linked to Gmail.

How to access Gmail from Inbox

There are 3 effective methods I found so far to clean my inbox:

1) Remove emails based on attachment size

If it is your first time cleaning inbox, this method is quite effective. Go to email search box and type this:

size:5000000

This command will search for emails with attachment more than 5MB. You can change the number to find bigger or smaller attachment sizes.

2) Remove emails from Social Networks

There are millions of transaction emails from Social Network e.g. when someone added you on LinkedIn. You can find the “from:” email address of these emails to use as the search keyword.

Tip: Bulk remove emails

It’s tiresome to remove 50 emails per page at a time. There is a way

If you want to remove all the emails that match what your search keyword, you can follow the instructions in the image below.

Tired of removing 50-100 emails at a time?

I saved several GBs of storage by removing Medium, Pinterest, Quora, Steam, LinkedIn

3) Unsubscribe to unused services

This method should be done regularly to keep your inbox clean. The only downside of Google Inbox is that it encourages you to set emails to “Done” instead of removing them. This will only slowly eat up your space.

Don’t hesitate to remove something you haven’t read for a while. It usually means you won’t read them in the future too.

Last but not least: Don’t forget to empty trash inbox

The emails will be removed within 30 days. But it’s better to empty now if you know you won’t need them anymore. Simply go to “Trash” menu on the left side and click “Empty”

That’s it! Hope these tips will help you reduce some GBs off your storage. I have reduced ~2GB from mine which not really impressive but will keep my inbox available for a while.


Posted

in

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *