Cleaning out your inbox is a real chore. But if you don't do your cleaning, you risk ending up with a pile of obsolete and useless emails that are just taking up disk space for nothing. So we're going to show you how to quickly find and delete your old emails in gmail.
Find your old emails in Gmail
One of the big assets of Gmail resides in its email search tool. At the same time, we couldn't ask for less from a tool provided by Google! This search field, located at the very top of the mailbox allows you to find emails from or intended for a specific person, emails containing certain keywords... but also to carry out searches on certain dates!
So to search your old messages (for example those that are more than a year old) you have to type the following text in the Gmail search field:
older_than:1yAs you will have understood, you can replace the 1 with any number to specify emails older than that.
It is also possible to use other time periods. So you can reason in months or days by replacing the "y" with "m" or "d" respectively:
older_than:1molder_than:1dAgain, replace the 1 with the number of months (m) or days (d) you are interested in.
Find old emails with a specific label
If you use labels to organize your emails in Gmail, you may want to clean up only emails with certain labels. It's entirely possible to do this.
To do this, simply click on a label in the left column and the search field at the top of your box will update as follows:
All you have to do is add the search expression we saw above (older_than:xx) in the search field to only display old emails in the selected category.
Even more filters
The advantage of this field of search made in Google is that you can filter your results even further.
Indeed, after performing a search, you will see several buttons appear below the search field. They allow you to filter the results of your search according to criteria such as the presence of an attachment, the sender, the recipient, etc.
Simply select one of these filters to narrow your search results. This is ideal if you want to, for example, only find old emails with attachments, but keep other emails you might need.
To remove a filter after applying it, simply click on it again. To perform a more in-depth search, click on “Advanced Search” to the right of the buttons.
Delete the emails you found
Once you've found those stale emails, filtered or verified them, and are ready to delete them, you've done the hard part!
You can then check all the emails you want to delete. If you are satisfied with your filtering, click directly on the checkbox at the very top of the Gmail interface.
Otherwise you can click on the small arrow next to this box to only check: read emails, unread emails, followed emails, etc.
You can also select the emails to delete one by one by checking or unchecking the boxes for each of them.
When you're ready, click the trash can in the toolbar to delete the selected emails.
Please note that you will not be asked to confirm this action! So if you delete a message by mistake, you will be able to find it in the Trash folder located on the left side of Gmail. mails are deleted automatically from the trash after 30 days!
Article updated on January 7, 2025 by Byothe
