How to bulk-delete emails on Gmail

All Google accounts get 15GB of free storage, that users can use for apps including their Gmail inbox, Google Drive files and more. However, unless you want to pay more for one of the Google One storage plans, your 15GB storage could run out very quickly.

The approach most users take to free up some storage includes manually deleting their emails, photos, and other files. If you’re like me and rely a lot on your emails for work, a large chunk of your limited storage could actually be occupied by Gmail without you realising it. While you can manually go through each of the thousands of emails to clear some storage, a quicker approach would be to bulk delete emails. Here’s how to do that using a simple trick that will work on most laptops.

How to bulk delete emails on Gmail

Begin with opening a browser of your choice and open Gmail. Log in with your Google Account, and you should now see all the recent emails in your inbox. You should also see a checkbox above all your mails towards the left. Click on the box to select all the mails on the page at once.

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You should also see a blue text that says, “Select all X conversations in Y,” where X is the number of emails and Y is the current section (Primary, Promotions, Social, etc). Click on the button to mass-select all emails in that section.

You can now hit the delete button (shaped like a trash can) to delete all selected emails. You can then repeat the process for all your other sections like Promotions and Social.

Recovering accidentally deleted emails

Once you delete a particular email, or a whole batch of emails, they aren’t gone for good. You can still recover accidentally deleted emails from the trash folder but note that all emails that go in the Trash folder will only be retained for a limited time, which is 30 days. Post this, your emails will be deleted permanently, and will be lost forever.

Congratulations, you now know how to bulk delete emails from your Gmail account. Use this tip to quickly free up storage in your free allocated Google storage, which you can then use for anything from WhatsApp chat backups to Google Photos.