Users’ email inboxes are often “cluttered” with old emails, unnecessary bulk subscriptions, or promotional emails. To help users save time, email services like Gmail provide an auto-delete feature, although this feature has its pros and cons.
Should you enable the auto-delete email feature? (Illustrative photo)
Should you enable the auto-delete email feature?
Most people advise you to enable the auto-delete email feature because such information quickly becomes outdated and no longer needed. Having too many emails can make it difficult for you to find truly important information or cause you to miss new emails.
Even if emails are organized in folders, searching through 50 emails is much easier than searching through 500 emails on a device. Gmail’s email filtering feature is usually ineffective when there are too many emails.
Aside from search speed, having too many emails can also affect the operating system, especially when you use a local email program – email management software on your computer or laptop. The more emails you have, the longer it takes the email program to start up and synchronize with the server.
For this reason, backup copies will take longer to display. Therefore, even if the hard drive capacity is still sufficient, it is best to keep your mailbox to a minimum.
Manually deleting all emails on a computer
Step 1: Log in to your Gmail account as usual.
Step 2: On the Gmail interface, on the left side menu bar, click on “All Mail”. If you don’t see this option, click on “More” to display additional options.
Click on “All Mail”.
Step 3: Correspondingly on the right side of the screen, you will see a list of all your emails on Gmail, including all archived emails. To delete all of these emails, first, select all by clicking “Select” (the square icon) at the top of the Gmail interface.
Click on “Select” (the square icon) at the top of the Gmail interface.
Step 4: Now all the emails displayed here will be selected. To select emails that do not appear on this page, click on the “Select All X Conversations in All Mail” button at the top of the email list, where “X” is the number of emails in the “All Mail” folder.
Click on the “Select All X Conversations in All Mail” button at the top of the email list.
Step 5: Now all your emails have been selected. To start deleting, at the top of the Gmail interface, click on the “Delete” option (the trash can icon). Then, a confirmation message will pop up. Click on “OK”.
Auto-delete email on Gmail
If you want everything to be more convenient, you can set up a filter to automatically delete old emails from your inbox.
Step 1: Open your Gmail account on the browser.
Step 2: In the Gmail inbox, on the right side of the screen, click on the “Settings” icon. Then, select “See all settings”.
Step 3: On the Settings page, select “Filters and Blocked Addresses”. From this menu, choose “Create a new filter”.
Step 4: On the popup window, enter “old_than: X” in the “Search” field. The “X” in this command will be the time frame you want to delete old messages. The command will be “d” for days, “w” for weeks, “m” for months, and “y” for years. For example, if you want the time frame to be four years, you will change “X” to 4y. Then, click on “Create filter”.
Step 5: A popup will appear asking if you want to create the filter. Select “OK”.
Step 6: Lastly, check the “Delete it” box and click on “Create filter”.
Now, any emails that are older than 30 days (or whichever number of days you choose) will be automatically deleted.
According to VTC
