Bulk Deleting Old Email in Gmail… Instead of 50 or 100 at a time!

December 21, 2023 / in How To, Information Technology / by Jason Terry

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Hello friends! This week’s Tech Tip is something a LOT of people struggle with. And it was brought up three different times at three different clients over the past two weeks… so I knew I needed to share this tip.

Have you ever tried deleting a bunch of old emails in Gmail?

Deleting a bunch of emails all at once in Gmail is not an easy thing. Well, at least if you don’t know the trick I am sharing with you today. A lot of people will get to a screen of emails they want to delete, click the checkbox in the top left that selects all emails on the screen, and then click the trash can to delete them. The problem? There are only 50 or 100 emails on the screen at a time. So if you wanted to delete 2,000 old emails, you would be doing that process a few dozen times. PAINFUL.

There is a better way!

In my video this week, I walk you through how to delete tens of thousands of emails at a time in Gmail using label filters and date filters. That might sound complicated, but it is actually really easy. The biggest trick is that as you are getting ready to delete, you have to notice the “select all conversations” before clicking delete. The link to do that is not obvious!

And if you are trying to delete 200,000+ old emails from your “Promotions” label in Gmail, it will likely fail. You might have to add an additional filter criteria of date to narrow the number of emails you are deleting. I walk you through THAT in my video as well.

This is a great time of year to clean up space in your Gmail account… and following this tip will help you do it quickly. Please consider forwarding this to your friends… a TON of people don’t know how to do this. I have explained this process to 6 different people this week at various companies and they LOVE knowing how to do this. They will thank you for forwarding this to them. (And thanks in advance from me as well!)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I will see you in 2024!