We all know how it goes: one day you look at your Gmail account, and you’ve got several thousand emails. Why be surprised? It’s all too easy to subscribe to dozens of company promotions without realizing it. If you buy anything online from a new service or retailer, you will be subscribed. If you want to read an article from a source that demands registration, you will be subscribed. If you sign a petition or give money to a charitable cause, you will be subscribed.

It is, of course, easy to ignore all those subscriptions and just let them pile up in your Gmail Promotions tab. But what if there is a really good sale at your favorite clothing retailer and you miss it because of the mass of other promotional emails? What if you’ve got so many emails stored up that they’re starting to eat into your Google storage limits? Or what if the thought of having several thousand promotional emails sitting in your Inbox is just, well, irritating?

Sometimes it’s a good idea to spend a little time cleaning out all those excess emails in your Gmail account and preventing more from coming in. Here’s how. (Note: the following instructions are for Gmail on a browser. You can do some of this with your mobile app; those options are listed at the end of this article.)

Unsubscribe or block

Google has actually made it fairly easy to unsubscribe from an email subscription. Emails that are perceived by Google’s AI engine to be promotional will have two “Unsubscribe” labels available: one in the main listing (which will become visible when you float your cursor over it) and a link to the right of the sender’s name after you open the email.

Click on the link, and you’ll see a pop-up with a blue “Unsubscribe” button. Click that, and you should soon stop getting emails from that source. (Remember that it can take a few days to get your name off a subscription list.)

Of course, there is also the old-fashioned way to unsubscribe; if you go to the bottom of most newsletters or promotional messages in your email, you’ll find an unsubscribe link that you can use.

Keep in mind, though, that there are a lot of spammers out there that use the “Unsubscribe” button to confirm that an email account is legitimate; responding to those could open you up to increased (rather than less) spam. Your best bet on this score is to use Gmail’s unsubscribe feature only for emails from vendors you know. Any contact in your Spam tab or that you aren’t familiar with should be blocked instead.

To block a sender, simply open the email, click on the three dots in the upper-right corner, and click on “Block [vendor name].”

Sometimes (a bit unpredictably), Gmail’s AI engine will notice you haven’t opened an email from a specific source in over 30 days and will ask you if you want to unsubscribe. By all means, take advantage of that should it occur.

Delete old emails

Unfortunately, unsubscribing from and even blocking a vendor doesn’t do anything about the several hundred (or more) emails that are still sitting in your Gmail account. Even if they’re emails from a company you like, sometimes you simply want to get rid of all the outdated emails cluttering your unbox.

There are a variety of ways you can get rid of old emails. You can try one of the apps that claim to make it easier to clean up your inbox, but it can be just as easy to do it yourself.

To get rid of an email from, say, a specific sender:

• Type the name of the sender into your search box.
• If the name of the sender is too general or may appear in other emails, open one of the emails in question, copy the email address, and paste it into the search box.
• If you want to make sure you’re just getting emails sent to you, you can type in “From:[sender]” or “From:[email address]” instead. You can also click on the icon on the right of the search field; that will reveal a form with a variety of fields that you can use to search for the emails you want to delete.
• Once you’ve done your search, click into the square box at the top-left corner of your email list. This will check off all the emails on that page. You can then click on the garbage can icon to send all the emails to the trash.

• If you have more than 50 emails in your search list, after you click into the little square, you’ll see a message at the top of the list that reads, “All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search.” The latter is a link; click on that, and all the emails from that sender will be selected.
• When you click on the delete symbol, you’ll get a typical “Are you sure you want to do this?” message. If you’re sure, go ahead and click “OK.”

If you’re a little nervous about deleting all the emails, you can scan the list and uncheck any that you don’t want to go to the trash; you can also archive those you’re not sure about, just to get them out of your inbox. Keep in mind that the mail you’ve just “deleted” isn’t really gone yet; you have 30 days to go into the Trash folder (the link is in the left column) and restore it.

Promotions you can’t get rid of

There is, of course, a class of promotions that you can’t get rid of: those ads that are sold by Google and that are therefore added to the top of your email list. (They are, thankfully, marked as “Sponsored,” so at least they are identifiable.) I usually find them in my Promotions and Updates tabs.

You can have a small amount of control over which ads appear there by turning on what Google calls personalized ads. That means, according to Google, that the ads you see will be determined by your preferred topics and brands, info in your Google account such as age and gender, and activity such as your searches, videos watched, and apps. I tend to keep personalized ads turned off; I’d rather put up with inappropriate ads than give Google yet another way to use my info. But it’s totally up to you.

Using the mobile app

While the “Unsubscribe” link is not available on the mobile Gmail listing, you will find it at the top of each (appropriate) individual email to the right of the sender’s name. As with the web version, just select the link and you’ll be asked to confirm the unsubscribe. (Sometimes Google’s Unsubscribe link will not work with a specific vendor; in that case, you may be asked to go to the website to unsubscribe.)

You can also block a sender by opening the email, clicking on the three dots to the far right of the sender’s name, and selecting “Block [sender name].”

If you want to delete a group of emails using your mobile phone, here’s how:

• Search for a specific vendor or email send by typing the name into the search box at the top of the email list.
• Once you tap in the search box, you’ll see several buttons below that will let you search within Labels, From, To, or Attachment (whether it has one and what type).
• Once you’ve done that, long-press on one of the results in the list. The icon to the left of the message will be checked.
• If you want to get rid of all the emails in the search, tap on the “Select all” box that will now appear at the top of the list.
• You can now delete those emails by selecting the trash can icon.

Update July 30th, 2024: This article was originally published on July 13th, 2020. It has been updated to reflect changes in the process of removing emails from Gmail’s web and mobile versions.