How to Clean Up Gmail in 3 Steps

Is your Gmail inbox always cluttered and taking up too much of your precious 15GB free storage? I’ve been there too, and fortunately, you don’t need to manually go through every single email and figure out what to do with it. You can clean up your Gmail in just 3 basic steps. Here’s what you need to do.

Step 1: Get Rid of Unwanted Subscriptions

We’ve all been there: signing up for email subscriptions that we don’t really need, and don’t want to read, only to have our inbox full of spammy, useless emails from all the mailing lists out there. Gmail makes it very easy to unsubscribe from such emails.

• Open Gmail and click on “Manage Subscriptions” in the sidebar. If it’s not visible, click on “More” and you will be able to find it.

• Now, go through the list of your subscriptions and for every unwanted subscription, just click on the “Unsubscribe” button.

That’s it. You can quickly cut down on useless emails filling up your Gmail inbox.

Step 2: Delete Emails with Large Attachments

Personally, I never used to delete old emails, and for a long time that didn’t give me any problems. However, after a while, my Google storage started filling up because of all the old emails I had never deleted. Here’s how you can find the emails eating up most of your storage and get rid of them easily.

• In Gmail, just search for the following

has: attachment larger:10MB

• You will now only see emails that taking up more than 10MB of space because of attachments. Simply select all the emails that you no longer need, and delete them.

Step 3: Organize Emails with Labels

Once you’ve cleaned up your inbox, it’s time to ensure it never goes back to that sorry state again, and labels are the easiest way to organize email.

• In Gmail, click on the + icon next to “Labels”.
• Create three labels:
  • Personal
  • Work
  • Receipts
• You can set up rules for emails to automatically get sorted into these labels, or you can manually move your emails around based on these categories.

The bottom line is that your inbox will be much more clean, and you won’t feel like pulling your hair out every time you open Gmail.