I’ve been using Gmail for ages and my storage is maxed out. Now I need to delete a huge number of old emails fast. I’m talking about tens of thousands of messages.
The problem is, I can only select 100 emails at a time on each page. This is super slow and doesn’t let me pick which ones to keep.
What I’ve tried:
- Deleting photos and videos to free up space
- Selecting all emails on a page (100 at a time)
What I need:
A quick way to delete tons of emails without losing important ones. Is there a tool or method that can:
- Delete emails in bulk
- Keep emails from my contacts
- Save emails with certain keywords
I’m not looking for storage advice. I just want to know how to mass delete emails quickly while keeping the important stuff. Any ideas?
hey, i feel ur pain! gmail can be a real pain when it comes to bulk deleting. have u tried using filters? u can set up a filter to automatically archive or delete emails that meet certain criteria. might take some time to set up, but it could save u hours in the long run. good luck!
I’ve been in your shoes before, and I found a nifty workaround using Google Apps Script. It’s a bit technical, but it saved me hours of manually deleting emails. Basically, you write a short script that automates the deletion process based on your criteria. You can set it to keep emails from specific contacts or with certain keywords, and delete the rest in bulk.
The script runs in the background, so you don’t have to babysit it. It took me about an hour to set up, but it deleted over 50,000 emails overnight. Just be sure to test it on a small batch first to make sure it’s working as intended. If you’re not comfortable with coding, there are some pre-written scripts available online that you can modify. It’s definitely worth looking into if you’re dealing with a massive email purge.
I’ve faced this issue before and found a solution that might help. Use Gmail’s search operators to narrow down the emails you want to delete. For example, ‘older_than:1y -is:important’ will find all emails older than a year that aren’t marked as important. Then, click the select all checkbox, choose ‘Select all conversations that match this search’, and delete. This method allows you to delete thousands of emails at once while keeping important ones. Just be cautious and double-check your search criteria before deleting. It’s also wise to export your data as a backup first, just in case.