it's easy Delete all your emails in Gmail But more likely, you just want to delete old messages that are no longer relevant. We'll walk you through how to delete old emails in gmail Keep your inbox flowing. You can even automate it.
quick answer
To delete old emails in Gmail:
- In the search bar, put older_than: [time period] Or before: [the date] To find old emails. The time period is a number and a letter, such as 1y For one year or 4w For four weeks. Date in YYYY/MM/DD format.
- Click Entry.
- Put Marker In the check box in the top left above the search results to select them all.
- Click trash icon To delete it.
Keep scrolling for more instructions on this process, and to learn how to automatically delete old emails.
How to delete old emails in Gmail
There are two commands you can put in the search bar to find old emails in Gmail.
To find all emails older than a certain time period, use older_than: [time period]. To find all emails received before a certain date, use before: [date].
You only need a number and one letter to indicate the time period. d It is today, w It's the week, m It is the month, and y It is the year. For the date, you enter it using the YYYY/MM/DD format.
For example, if you wanted to find all emails that were older than two years, you could put old_than: 2y in the search bar.
If you want to find all emails received before March 2023, you can search by: 2023 / 03 / 01.
Add Search criteria that you want and then press the key Input. Emails matching your search will appear.
Now, to delete all emails that appear in your search, select them all by clicking the checkbox in the top left.
Note that if you have more than one page of results (more than 50 emails), you'll see a message at this point telling you that clicking this checkbox has only highlighted all the emails on that page. It will also give you the option to select all the emails in the results. Click this if you want to delete them all.
Finally, tap the trash icon to move all these emails to Trash.
They'll be automatically deleted from your Trash folder after 30 days. But you can completely remove them immediately by emptying your Trash in Gmail.
How to automatically delete old emails in Gmail
As easy as the above process is, you don't need to do it regularly. You can set up filter To automatically delete old emails in Gmail, it's easy to do now that you have the search terms you want.
Start by clicking the Show button. Search OptionsThis button is located at the far right of the search bar and is represented by an icon of some face.
You'll see several fields you can use to filter emails. You'll need to use the search terms from the section above in the field containing the words.
In this example, I want to delete all my emails that are more than five years old. So in the field "contains the words", I entered older_than: 5y.
After that, press Create a filter.
You may see a notification that your filter isn't recommended because it will never match your inbox. We know this because we only target old messages, not incoming ones. Just tap "OK".
You now have a second list of options to choose what happens to emails to which your filter applies. Click the checkbox next to Delete.
If your filter applies to messages in your inbox and you want to delete them as well, you should also select the checkbox next to Also apply filter to X matching conversations. In the example above, there are two conversations that are over five years old, so I selected the box.
Click on Create a filter.
You'll return to your inbox with a message in the bottom right corner confirming the filter creation. Old emails that match the filter criteria will be automatically deleted. Just make sure you're sure, as you may not be able to Recover deleted emails.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q1: Can I delete emails by date range?
The answer: Yes. Follow the steps in the first section above, but use two search criteria in the search bar instead of one. For example, you could search for all emails in the first week of April 2023 using the following term: 2023/4/1 before: 2023/4/8 and then delete the results.
