How to Clean Out Your Gmail Account and Start Again From Scratch

When Gmail showed up in 2004 with its overwhelmingly generous 1GB of free space for everyone, we never thought we’d have to delete an email again—but even though that free space is now 15 times what it once was, email is more burdensome than ever. 

It’s not really the available space that’s the problem in Gmail; it’s the sheer number of unread, unnecessary, and unsolicited emails clogging up the archives. Checking the inbox becomes depressing, running a useful search becomes nearly impossible, and systems of labels that once made sense have long since been abandoned.

It’s time to cut your losses, so here’s how you can start again from the beginning, and do better next time.

Deleting messages

The first step is to delete everything in your Gmail account. Now, we can’t be held responsible if you erase a message you later realize you actually needed to hang on to, so proceed at your own risk—if you want to make a backup of your emails first, use Google’s comprehensive export tool to get your emails out—though that’s really just delaying the inevitable and necessary purge.

You can also forward the most useful messages out to another account (your starred messages and emails to and from the most important people in your life might be good places to check) or use Gmail’s POP/IMAP features to get your emails downloaded to a desktop client for safe keeping—Google has full instructions as to how to enable and use them here and here.

As for deleting all your messages, well that’s actually scarily simple: Go to the All Mail page, place a tick in the selection box to the top left, and when you see the Select all... message at the top, click it. Then click the trashcan icon at the top of the message list and in a few seconds all of your Gmail history will be gone.

Well, gone to the Trash folder anyway. If you don’t want to wait around for messages to auto-expire, you can go to the Trash and click Empty Trash nowand then OK. You might want to visit the Spam folder as well, just to make sure absolutely everything’s gone. With any luck, you might experience a minute or two of peace before your inbox starts filling up again.

Erasing contacts

Gmail’s eagerness to make it simple for you to email your contacts is helpful sometimes, but it creates an unsightly mess in your contacts list if you’re not careful. People you only ever emailed once ten years ago can suddenly show up as contacts on your Android phone for no reason (we’ve seen it happen). For the most comprehensive email detox, you want to get rid of your contacts as well.

This is trickier to do, because as we’ve mentioned, your contacts sync across multiple Google services, like Android. Ideally we want to trim down any useless email addresses while keeping the important ones and without deleting anyone’s phone number along the way, and Google doesn’t really make this particularly easy to do.

to be continued.....