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How to Clean out Your Gmail Inbox

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

It happened so slowly you hardly noticed. Then one day, you look at your Gmail inbox, and you have hundreds or even thousands of emails, and you have no hope of ever catching up. It seems you have a devil's choice: delete them all and lose the record of all your important emails, or archive them all and keep a bunch of junk you never read for good reason. Luckily, Gmail has some simple but powerful tools to help you search and manage your emails. Here's how to use those tools to quickly and easily clean out an overflowing inbox.

  Steps

1.   Open your gmail account.
2.   In the search box, type "in:inbox is:read" (without quotes) and click the Search Mail button. You will now see the 20 most recent emails you have actually read.
3.   Find the "Select" links just above the table of emails. It will say, "Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred".
4.   Click on the word "All" to select all the emails that match your search. All the emails on the page should now be checked.
5.   Click the link at the top of the list that says, "Select all conversations that match this search." This will make sure you have selected even the messages that don't fit on the page.
6.   Click the "Archive" button at the top of the email area. Now all of your read emails have been saved to your archive, where they can be searched but where they won't clutter up your inbox.
7.   Decide how far back you want to check your unread emails for important messages you might have missed. This will depend on how much time you have to spend on the project, and how fast your unread email tends to accumulate. 1 to 3 months is a good rule of thumb. If the email is older than that, either it was important enough that the sender will try to reach you again, or it no longer matters.  For illustration, let's choose a date of August 1st 2009.
8.   Type "in:inbox before:2009/08/01" (use whatever date you have chosen) in the search box, and click "Search".  The format of the date is important. It must be in the form YYYY/MM/DD, with all 4 digits of the year listed first, then the month with two digits, and finally the date with two digits.
9.   Select all of these messages by clicking "All" then "Select all conversations that match this search", just like you did above.
10.   Take a deep breath, and click "Delete".
11.   Confirm that you want to delete all messages. All those messages are in your trash. Hooray!
12.   Click "Inbox" on the navigation bar next to your email list. You should now have nothing but the most recent unread messages.
13.   Scan through your unread mail for important messages you may have missed.
14.   Read the important messages, deal with them, and archive them to get them out of your inbox.
15.   Search for "in:inbox is:unread" to get to all the messages remaining. Select all and delete using the methods described above.
16.   Congratulate yourself, and resolve to never let your inbox overflow again! Read your emails and respond, archive, or delete them promptly from now on.

  Tips

• If you want to be more refined about which emails you archive or delete, read about Gmail's other filtering commands (see link below) and use them to search and take action on your email backlog.
• All the emails you have deleted will be held in your Trash for about a month. If you think of something you might need to recover, you can search the trash by using the search term "in:trash". When you find the message, move it to the archive to save it.

  Related wikiHows

• How to Unsubscribe-from-Spam

  Sources and Citations

• Google's Advanced Search Guide

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