Gmail Tip: Clean out your Inbox by archiving old mail

Does your Inbox have more that 100 messages? 500 messages? Maybe even thousands? If so, you've got a case of Inbox Bloat! There’s really no reason to keep all that email in your Inbox. It’s much easier to archive your old messages.

Why? Archiving helps you:

• Better manage your Inbox by keeping it neat, tidy, and uncluttered.
• Reduce your stress level. Many people tend to feel overwhelmed when their Inbox is full of old messages. By reducing your Inbox to only new messages, or messages you need to deal with soon, your workload doesn't seem so insurmountable.
• Have a sense of accomplishment. Think about it - if your Inbox contained only a few messages, wouldn't you feel like you accomplished something?

Remember, you can always get back to any message you archived, either by going to your All Mail label or simply performing  a search. If you’re not sure how archiving works in Gmail, here’s some information that should help: What is archiving?

1. Search for old messages

So one tactic for cleaning out your Inbox is to get rid of all messages. To begin, see how many messages you currently have in your Inbox by looking at the top left of your message list. Looks like we have 228 messages!


Next, decide how old a message should be before you archive it. For our example, we’ll search for all messages in our Inbox that are older than 30 days. You can easily do this using keyword searches. To search for a specific date, enter before:yyyy/mm/dd as in before:2011/10/1. To concentrate only on messages in your Inbox, enter in:inbox. Our search would therefore look like this:

2. Archive the old messages

In the search results below, we see that 145 messages matched the search. To quickly archive all these messages:

1. Click the box to select all messages. This selects only messages in the current view, which here is only 20 messages. This would be ok if all messages returned from the search fit in this window. But since there are more messages than can be displayed...
2. Click Select all conversations that match this search to select the other messages, too.
3. Once all your results are selected, click the Archive button to move them to your archive.

3. Archive messages you’ve already read

Going back to your Inbox, you should now notice a lot fewer messages. That certainly seems more manageable! But, there are probably still messages you’ve already read that you might as well archive, too. To do that, let’s do another search - this time for all messages in your inbox (in:inbox) that you’ve already read (is:read). As such, your search would look like this:


When you get these results, perform the same steps as above to archive them.  (Remember to check the Select all conversations that match this search box, if you have more results than fit in the current view.)

There you are. Your Inbox is clean and tidy. Don’t you feel better? As you can see below, we were able to reduce our Inbox to 6 messages. Your results will, of course, vary.

One final tip: Archive as you go!

Finally, here’s a tip to help keep your Inbox from any future bloat. When you are replying to an email clicking Send & Archive sends your reply and automatically archives the message, all in one fell swoop! By contrast, clicking Send would simply send the message while the original would remain in your Inbox.