how do i clear my gmail inbox without deleting mails on my labels

Several schools of thought exist on how to label emails-some folks insist on sorting by deadlines, while others suggest grouping by concepts such as “awaiting response” and “action required”-but I’m not looking to rethink my approach to email fundamentally here.Įven if you don’t have a separate auto-forwarding email accounts, you can set up a similar system by adding a plus symbol and any combination of letters and numbers to your email address ( for instance). Labels are a longstanding Gmail feature that categorizes messages without hiding them from your inbox. Now, I take a more proactive approach by labeling certain kinds of emails.

(If you’re worried about wasting precious storage space, there are other ways to delete the emails you no longer need.)Ĭreate a few labels or folders: While I’ve taken the above two steps in the past, on their own they’ve never kept my inbox clean for long. Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook all offer the option to archive emails instead of deleting them. Unlike straight-up deletion, archiving an email removes it from your inbox but still lets you find it through search, labels, or folders. I found that anything older than a few weeks wasn’t likely to get a response from me anyway.Īrchive the rest: After answering a sufficient number of recent emails, I declared pseudo- email bankruptcy and archived the rest of my inbox. You could go back two weeks, or a month, or two months, but the point is just to deal with anything that might still be urgent.

Deal with recent emails: My first (and longest) step was to go through the past few weeks of emails and address every one of them, either by responding, archiving them, or deleting them outright.

How do i clear my gmail inbox without deleting mails on my labels