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How to Delete Old Email in Gmail?

Wondershare Recoverit Authors

Jan 27, 2024 • Filed to: Recover Emails • Proven solutions

If you are a Gmail user and are running low on storage, then this would be the perfect guide for you. While Gmail provides 15 GB of free storage, you might run out of it in the long run. Thankfully, Gmail lets us delete old emails pretty easily to manage our space. Ideally, you can learn how to delete old emails in Gmail automatically or via manual methods. In this post, I will let you know how to auto-delete emails in Gmail like a pro!

What you Should know About Gmail's Advanced Search

To help you delete old emails in Gmail, I would recommend using the Advanced Search feature of the email service. By default, Gmail has included an in-depth search option that would let you filter your emails in different ways.

To get the Gmail Advanced search, just log-in to your Gmail account, and go to the search bar at the top. Now, click on the dropdown icon at the right end of the search bar to get the advanced search options.

Gmail Advanced Search

This will provide a wide range of filters that you can use to search your emails based on their subject, recipient, sender, and more. You can also enter keywords and look for emails from a particular date or of certain attachment sizes.

Advanced Search Options in Gmail


How to Manually Delete Old Emails in Gmail?

One of the best things about Gmail is that it lets us manually delete bulk emails or set automatic filters as well. Therefore, if you have limited free space on your account, then you can learn how to delete old emails in Gmail in the following way.

Step 1. Firstly, just log-in to your Gmail account on any computer and go to the search option from the top.

Step 2. Now, you can use keywords such as “before” or “older_than” to get old emails. For instance, to get emails that are older than 60 days, you can just write “older_than:60d” in the search option.

Step 3. Similarly, if you want to look for emails for a particular time, then write the date in YYYY/DD/MM format (like before:2017/26/05 to search for emails that are dated before 26th May 2017).

Gmail Filter Before Date

Step 4. As I have included above, you can also take the assistance of the Advanced Search of Gmail to manually enter the date for old emails.

Step 5. That's it! Once you get the searched results on your Gmail, just select all the old emails by clicking on the checkbox at the toolbar. After all the old emails are selected, click on the trash icon to delete them from the Inbox.

Gmail Bulk Delete Mails


How to Delete Emails in Gmail Automatically?

Since the manual process to delete old emails in Gmail is pretty complicated, you can also automate things. If you want, you can create dedicated filters for your Gmail inbox and delete those emails by themselves. To learn how to auto delete emails in Gmail, you just have to follow this basic drill.

Step 1. To begin with, you can just log-in to your Gmail account and click on the gear icon from the top to visit its settings.

Step 2. Once the Gmail Settings page is opened, you can go to the “Filters & Blocked Addresses” section and click on the “Create a new filter” option.

Gmail Create New Filter

Step 3. This will display dedicated parameters for you to set for the filter. Here, you can set filters for emails from a particular recipient with dedicated subjects, keywords, size, and so on.

Gmail Filter Features

Step 4. After you would set up different parameters for the filter, you can decide what would be done to these emails. In the end, you can select the option to automatically delete these emails and create a new filter.

Gmail Filter Bulk Delete

Apart from deleting, you can also set different automatic actions (like marking them as read or skipping the Inbox) for the filtered emails.


How to Delete Old Emails in Gmail Automatically?

As you can see, it is pretty easy to manually delete old emails in Gmail. Just like that, you can also take the assistance of the Gmail Advanced search to automatically delete old emails. To learn how to delete old emails automatically in Gmail, you simply need to do the following things.

Step 1. Go to the Gmail website, log-in to your account, and just click on the dropdown menu from the search bar to get the advanced search options.

Step 2. Here, you can create a filter using the “before” or “older_than” keywords to mark old emails for any duration of your choice.

Gmail Filter Older Than

Step 3. Once the filter is created, you can select an appropriate action. In this case, you can choose to delete the old emails automatically after creating the filter.

Gmail Auto Delete Old Emails

This will first create a filter for the emails (for the duration you have entered) and then would automatically delete them from Gmail.


Part 5: How to Recover Old Deleted Gmail Emails from your Computer?

Since it is pretty easy to auto delete emails in Gmail, you can remove your unwanted emails easily. Sadly, at times, people end up deleting their important emails by mistake from their computer. If your emails were saved on the local storage (via Outlook or any other third-party service), then you can easily get them back. For this, you can use Wondershare Recoverit data recovery software, which is one of the best desktop recovery applications out there.

To know how Recoverit Data Recovery can restore your deleted emails, the following steps can be taken:

Step 1 Select from where you lost your data

At first, you can just launch Recoverit Data Recovery on your system and select a drive or partition to scan. You can also browse to a specific folder from where you lost your Gmail data.

computer data recovery

Step 2 Wait for the Recoverit to complete the scan

Once you click on the “Start” button, the application would scan the source and extract your data. You can view the progress of the application from an indicator and even click on the stop or pause button here.

computer scan

Step 3 Restore your Deleted Gmail Data

Afterward, Recoverit Data Recovery would automatically display the extracted content under different categories. You can view your data and use the inbuilt filters from the sidebar to search for files based on their size, type, last modified date, etc.

file filter

More Related:
5 Best Gmail Backup Tools
Backup Emails to External Storage

That's it! You can now just preview your photos, videos, documents, and other files on the native interface of Recoverit Data Recovery. Simply select what you wish to get back and click on the “Recover” button to save your files at a preferred location on your computer.

photo preview

That's a wrap, everyone! After reading this guide, you would have got your doubts cleared like does Gmail delete old emails or how to auto delete emails in Gmail. As you can see, I have listed both manual and automatic ways to delete old emails in Gmail. Though, if you have deleted your emails by mistake, then use a reliable tool like Recoverit Data Recovery. A user-friendly and resourceful recovery tool, it will help you get back all kinds of lost and deleted data under every possible scenario.

Recoverit author

Amy Dennis

staff Editor

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