How to Delete Frequent and Unwanted Gmail Items In Bulk

It's a common habit that we often leave the items in our Gmail inbox to get bulky or too big to the extent that it even disrupts us when we try to access new mails. While this is true, we try as much as possible to delete the few we can, only to stop along the way because of their numbers. Now this is not a case to kill yourself over, it's simply a general habit. Myself,  I don’t always delete emails as fast as I could. Most of the accrued items tend to be non-urgent items which we get on a recurring basis that we haven’t flagged as a priority.

At some point, we reach that tipping point and want to delete these Google emails in mass. In this post, I will sharing with you a method I learned from Productivity Portfolio which easily lets you delete frequent and unwanted Gmail items in bulk. This tutorial unlike other ones I have come across on the internet requires minimal effort, so be sure you can do it!

There are some emails that contribute to the bulk items you receive in your Gmail account. Most of them are generic and are emails which you had received, but could not reply. The key to this strategy is to first delete emails from folks that send you email, but you don’t reply or correspond to that email address. Some examples include:

* Newsletters you no longer read
* Daily coupon or deals emails
* System status messages
* Promotions from merchants
* Product announcements
* Old webinar reminders

Finding and Deleting Email From Frequent Senders
1. Glance at your inbox and look for frequent senders of email. In my case, I have a number of newsletter subscriptions and alerts.
2. Hover your mouse over the sender’s email address. Technically, you don’t need to open the email as you can do this from your email list. A small dialog pops up with additional buttons.

3. Click the More button and select Recent Conversations. Google will display a list of all the emails that match the sender’s address. This will include email they’ve sent you and any email you’ve sent them.
4. Review the results to make sure you wish to delete all the emails from this sender. If you see any starred items, you might want to use the Unstarred item from the menu instead of checking the box.
5. Check the box in the top left corner to select all the emails that show. If you have more matching emails than your display setting, you’ll also see another link, Select all conversations that match this search.

6. Click the Delete button at the top.

7. Click OK on the dialog asking you to confirm email deletion.

Deleting Emails Based On A Common String
The above strategy works well when you want to delete all the content from that sender. But, sometimes situations arise where the sender sends out multiple types of emails under one email address. In this case, you just want to delete a subset.

As example, I’m an Amazon Web Services customer. If I look at my recent conversations, I can tell there are certain items I want to keep and certain items I want to delete.

In looking at the email subject lines, I can see a pattern – Amazon Web Services Newsletter, which I’ve highlighted above. I simply copy and paste this common string into the search box above the emails. I tend to wrap the phrase with quotes. When I click the Search Mail button, I’ll get a filtered email list where I can delete emails in quantity.

The above steps for deleting Gmail email in bulk won’t get you to “inbox zero” in one fell swoop. However, it will give you the tools to chip away at large chunks of email.

Like I said this method was originally adopted by Productivity Portfolio, I gave it a trial and it worked, so I decided to put it on here.

Let me know if it worked for you as well using the comment form below.

Cheers!