Do you have hundreds of unread emails in your inbox?
Does it feel like your inbox is always overflowing with new emails?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, then now is the time to start using your inbox as it should be, and not as one giant mail storage container.
Now, I’m not suggesting for one minute that you read and delete the 2000+ unread emails. Sometimes it’s just time to draw a line and start fresh.
My suggestion is to delete or archive any regularly received newsletter emails that you no longer require.
I would then select any emails older than x amount of months and archive them.
I tend to go for 3 months but it’s your call on how long you want to go back.
In Gmail, to select the emails older than 3 months from your huge inbox, all you need to do is search with this command:
in:inbox before:2023/06/01
It will look something like this:
Doing that will bring up a list of results that match your search criteria.
From here, tick the “Select All” checkbox – like this:
That checkbox accounts for the emails on the first page, so if your messages exceed 50 emails, you can click on the link to select all emails in the search results.
Once I’ve made my selection, I click the “Archive” button – here:
With that, you’ll see the message “conversations have been archived” to confirm the action.
It’s as easy as that!
Now, you’re ready to enjoy a clearer Inbox.
To maintain it, I like to set aside 30-mins a day to go through my emails and delete ones I don’t need, and archive any that I want to keep but don’t want to see immediately visible in my Inbox.
Archiving emails still affects your data storage, because they remain in your Gmail account.
To find your archived emails, either click the “All Mail” list or do a Gmail search for the results to be listed for you in the usual way.