I’ve got a lot of garbage emails from the same people, spammers, companies I no longer care about, and I’d like to eliminate easily some of them going back years, but I see no way to bundle all my emails over the years from “XYZ Corporation” whose products I no longer use. Logic tells me there should be some way to do this—on Outlook, it’s as simple as rearranging all my emails under “From.” Is there such a thing on Gmail?
If you right click on one of the emails, you can do a search for all emails ‘from’ that sender.
Amazingly Gmail lacks this basic function. They only offer filters.
I think you can use those filters to move all emails from a specific sender to a particular folder, and then you can sort or delete from there. If you set a new rule or filter it should ask you if you want to apply that to all existing emails.
And how do I do that?
As was stated:
Right-click on one the emails, and from the drop-down list, choose ‘Find emails from (this sender)’.
Once the results of that search are displayed, there should be a check box above the list of emails. That is the ‘select’ box. Click on this and make sure you choose ‘All’, which will select the first 50 messages. You will then be presented with a bolded phrase ‘Select all messages that match this search’. Click on that, hit the trash can icon, and you’re done.
Thanks.
Note that Gmail doesn’t have folders but instead has labels. It may seem a silly difference but one advantage of their approach is that any given message could have multiple labels and findable by any of them.
The Gmail interface is surprisingly terrible. I have found this website to sometimes be helpful
I faced this last weekend.
The filter tool works pretty well - if you know what to filter on, and can apply the date logic correctly (this was not intuitive at least to me).
My wife has gmails from 2007 and I’ve tried the obvious ones to filer on (PTA, swim team, etc.) but you get too many results to be sure a bulk delete doesn’t kill one she wanted.
What i am in the process of doing is, having dumped the entire mailbox (google takeout) onto external storage and then plan to import them into a mail reader that has sorting capabilities so i can ID good search, or really, save targets and then go back to clean it up in Gmail later.
That seems like it will work but is tedious and shouldn’t be necessary - just offer better reporting and analysis.
My employer switched from Microsoft Office (including Exchange/Outlook for mail) and network shares for file storage to the Google suite of applications including Gmail and Google Drive for file storage.
And more than once I’ve noted that even though Google’s “core competency” is supposed to be search, it’s not as easy to find email messages in Gmail as it was in Outlook.
You can put them all into one filter so you don’t end up with dozens of filters.
Click on the gear icon to open settings. Click on “See all settings,” then the “Filters and blocked addresses” tab. “Create a new filter.” Copy/paste the email address from any and all spammers you encounter into the “From” field, then click “Create filter.” On the next page check the “Delete it” box, then click “Create filter.” You can add addresses to the list by just adding “OR” in between them.