How to Mass Delete Emails on Gmail

By learning how to mass delete emails in Gmail, you’ll gain the ability to delete emails in bulk to quickly and effortlessly clean up your messy inbox. For those seeking an automated solution that streamlines the process even further, Clean Email emerges as a powerful tool that can help delete bulk emails in Gmail automatically.

When It’s Time to Bulk Delete Gmail Emails

Since Marie Kondo published her first book on organizing, countless people around the world have applied her method (known as the KonMari method) to declutter their lives by getting rid of all things that “don’t spark joy.”

The same method can also be applied to our digital lives and our cluttered inboxes in particular. But to do so, you need to learn how to mass delete emails on Gmail, and that’s exactly what we explain in this article.

You can delete Gmail emails in bulk using the native email organization features present in this mail provider or with the help of third-party tools, and we describe both methods in the following sections.

How to Mass Delete Emails on Gmail

Let’s say that your inbox is so neglected and overflowing with useless messages that you’re ready to apply the Gmail bulk delete to get rid of everything in one go. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Log in to your mail account.
2. Navigate to the Inbox folder.
3. Click the top checkbox.
4. Click the “Select all [number] conversations in Inbox” option.
5. Click the Delete button.

All messages that were present in your inbox are now in the Trash folder. If you know for sure that you will never want to recover deleted emails from Gmail, you can open the Trash folder, and click the Empty Trash now option. Alternatively, you can wait for 30 days for the Trash folder to be automatically emptied.

How to Mass Delete Specific Emails on Gmail

Okay, so it’s easy to mass delete Gmail emails regardless of their content, age, and other criteria. But what if you want to learn how to clean up all promotions or how to delete all unread emails in Gmail?

Fortunately, that’s easy too! Let’s take a look at several common scenarios, including those mentioned above:

How to delete all promotions:

1. Log in to your mail account.
2. Navigate to the Promotions category.
3. Click the top checkbox.
4. Click the “Select all [number] conversations in Inbox” option.
5. Click the Delete button.

How to delete all unread messages:

1. Log in to your mail account.
2. Type "is:unread" in the search bar and hit Enter.
3. Click the top checkbox.
4. Click the “Select all [number] conversations in Inbox” option.
5. Click the Delete button.

How to Delete Gmail Emails in Bulk Using a Third-Party Tool

While it’s certainly possible to clean up messages in bulk using nothing but Gmail’s own email management features, you may find it difficult or impossible to bulk remove messages based on very specific criteria.

For example, you can’t quickly and easily delete large emails in Gmail while automatically excluding messages sent to you by a specific sender. That’s where third-party inbox management tools like Clean Email come in.

Clean Email offers a wide range of email filtering options, allowing you to clean up multiple messages based on its Smart Folders, custom search filters, and other criteria.

Of course, Clean Email lets you change the size of messages you want to remove, and you can easily apply more filters at the same time to, for example, clean up large messages that are older than 1 year.

Besides its Gmail bulk delete capabilities, Clean Email can also unsubscribe you from unwanted subscriptions, block annoying senders, automate commonly performed inbox management actions, and more—all while respecting your privacy and keeping your messages secure.