My wife informs me that her Gmail suddenly shows more than 55,000 emails in her inbox, dating back to 2020. She says she has always saved important emails in separate folders, and swears she regularly cleaned out her inbox and can’t understand why the emails are suddenly back. Because she has the important emails in different folders, she isn’t concerned about wiping out anything before 1/01/2025. Nevertheless we can’t find any tips on how to eliminate more than one screen (50 messages) at one time. Is there anyway to wipe them out in a bigger bunch - like maybe a year at a time?
On the desktop browser app, if I click the “select all” checkbox in the top left corner of the mail list, I get a notice that comes up across the top of the list asking if I want to select all 16,292 conversations. You can click on that.
It takes a bit for the actual number of emails in your folder to actually go down to 0 once you delete or move. But it does happen.
I suspect this works the same on any folder. So if you have a defined set of emails on your screen, it should ask you if you want to select all.
ETA: Here’s an article on it with images. How to Select All Emails in Gmail
Is she in the “All mail” view instead of Inbox? Gmail typically archives emails instead of deleting them.
Also, if she was using a desktop client instead of the Gmail website, that might have its own local copy of emails and she might’ve been deleting those instead of the Gmail originals.
Emails truly deleted from Gmail will go in the trash and be permanently unrecoverable after 30 days.
This, and that article leave out a step. This might be something Google added yesterday, but I needed to do it.
On the one I’m using, I click the top check box to select all of the messages. That selects the 50 or so on the page, and it creates a menu to the right of the check box. The last item in the menu is the stacked dots(⋮), hiding more options. Click on that, and at the very bottom of the menu that appears it will say “switch to advanced toolbar”. Click on that.
Once I did all of that, I finally got the question about selecting all of the messages in the inbox.
I don’t know that selecting all of the messages and deleting them or archiving them is the right thing to do, but at least now you’ll have the secret to select all of the messages, if you need to.
Although Google is a lot futzier about it than they used to be, it is still possible to authorize the use of an actual email application to interact with gmail. Thunderbird, for instance, or Mailbird.
You can do an advanced search to isolate the ones you want to move and then move or delete the entire set of results all in one whack in pretty much any decent email application.
It’d take very, very long to sync all those 55k emails over to a desktop client for deletion though. If you “select all” on the web app, it will do it all serverside without having to load the individual emails first.
Note that Gmail doesn’t have actual folders but instead “labels” that you can attach to messages. If she had actual folders, she may have been using some sort of client software to access the Gmail account.
Though it may still take a long time, and, in my experience, you may have to go back and do it again a few times.
It was a lot of work clearing things out so that it woudln’t keep using of my Dad’s Google Drive space. I don’t know how you wind up with multiple gigabytes of emails even after attachments are removed, but he pulled it off somehow. Mine is much smaller, despite rarely deleting anything.
If that’s the issue then I think you can sort the mail by size. That way you can delete the biggest ones first.
Not quite. You can find emails bigger than a certain size, but they won’t actually sort biggest to smallest. I did do the former for sure.
So start by finding messages larger than, say, ten megabytes and delete as many of them as possible.
Alternatively, it could be that they are labelled rather than in folders, in which case an “all emails” view would presumably include the ones she wants to keep?
I’ve never done any mass deletion from gmail so I dont know exactly how it works, but I’d be careful before just selecting everything to delete.
I did say I used that feature.
There just was a lot left. little messages add up. I still don’t know how he did it.
To rephrase what @Dewey_Finn and @DCTrekkie said: folders in GMail are not folders in the same sense as directories on a PC hard disk; they’re labels with some decoration to make them act like folders. The Inbox itself is a label. A single message can be assigned multiple labels and thus appear simultaneously in multiple “folders”, but it’s still only one message. Deletion of that message will delete it from all its “folders” at once.
I recommend you try locating a semi-important email that’s been placed in one of those “folders” in the past few months; then come back to the big list of 55000 messages and try to locate that same email message there. If it’s listed there, then deleting all 55000 messages would likely delete that message from its “folder” too.
The above description is based on using GMail in a web browser on a computer, or in the GMail mobile application. If you’re viewing GMail in a different environment, like Windows Mail or the “Mail” app on a Mac or iPhone, the model is a bit different, but you should still test on a small sample before you delete the whole Inbox contents.