More and more people use Gmail nowadays. And that’s not a surprise because there are a lot of reasons for this: convenience, prevalence, binding to Google Play Market, and other useful features and add-ons. But like any other email service, when you use it for a long time, it’s getting overloaded with junk, which makes it difficult to find something that makes sense.
Very often people start to clean their email inboxes only when they don’t have any free storage for incoming messages left. In the free version of Gmail, it’s 15 GB. You may think that it will take you forever to fill this storage, but, in reality, if you use Google Drive or Google Photos, it can take you much less time than you think. Even if you do not use additional services, people often attach files in the messages, which also takes up space. And, finally, it’s much more pleasant to see your inbox organized, when you don’t have to waste time while looking for the needed messages.
There are a few methods of how you can clean up your Gmail.
- Start with finding out how much storage is occupied in your Google Drive since Gmail storage is shared with Google Drive and Google Photos. The files of the largest size will be displayed at the top of the list. Probably you don’t need all of them. So you can delete the unneeded files and empty your trash folder afterwards, otherwise, they will still take up your space.
- Begin the cleaning process of email inbox with the messages that take up the most space. To do this, enter “larger: 5M” in the search bar. You can use any needed number instead of 5. You will see all emails that take up 5 megabytes and more. Delete them, saving the required attachments. Also, it’s recommended to clean the messages which are older than a certain period of time, that suits you.
- The categories in Gmail are very useful features. They were designed for easy sorting of emails and quick information retrievals, like Promotions or Social. You can add the categories that will work for you as well. If you open, for example, Promotions, you will see marketing emails and newsletters you are subscribed to. Of course, Gmail filters are not perfect and you have to keep abreast not to accidentally lose an important message in another category.
- Use a specialized email organizer app like Clean Email. It automatically categorizes your incoming messages according to your own rules, so it will take you a short time to make a certain action with the number of emails at once. Usually, such apps also have an unsubscribe feature that shows all your available subscriptions in one place. For example, you are using your main account for registering on various shopping sites. With time, you will start receiving a lot of marketing newsletters and promotions which will overload your mailbox and make it more difficult to find important work-related messages. Therefore, it’s very important to timeline opt-out from all newsletters that you are not really interested in.
These are just some of the Gmail inbox cleaning strategies, however, if you start to do it regularly, you will have your mailbox organized and under full control very soon.