If you use any type of email service, then you are most likely used to receiving more emails than you want or need. And deleting old or junk emails can be time consuming if you do not keep up with it on a regular basis. Most people who have been using the same email address for years will have years of email messages in their inbox and most of the time they just leave them there because it’s easier than deleting them all.
Watch Video: How to Have Gmail Delete Emails Older Than a Certain Date.
If you are a Gmail user, then you most likely have several pages of emails in your inbox as well as the other categories such as Promotions and Updates. If you want to clean up your inbox, then there is a fairly easy way to do so. In this article, we will be showing you how to have Gmail delete emails older than a certain date of your choosing.
To perform this cleanup task, we will be using the filter option that comes with the search feature in Gmail. The image below shows the oldest email in our Updates and Promotions categories. We will be deleting all the emails that are dated older than 12/10/2022.
To begin the process, we will be going to the Gmail settings by clicking on the gear icon at the upper right of the page and then clicking on See all settings. We will then go to the Filters and Blocked Addresses section at the top of the page.
Next, click on the Create a new filter link.
Before you create this new filter, you will need to decide how far back you want to delete. You can use the following text for the filter.
older_than:X
Use y for years
Use m for months
Use d for days
One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot add an exact date to this filter so it will have to be X number of days, months or years from the current date. Since today is 7/10/24 we will need to figure out how many months are from 12/10/22 to 7/10/24. So, there were 12 months in 2023 and 7 months have passed in 2024 so we will go back 19 months.
To accomplish this, we will use older_than:19m for our filter and type this in on the line that says Has the words and then click on Create filter.
You may receive a message saying this type of filter is not recommended to use but you can just click on the OK button.
On the next screen, you will need to check the boxes for Delete and Also apply filter to matching conversations. Then click on the Create filter button and the emails will be deleted. One thing to keep in mind is that the process may take several minutes if you are deleting hundreds or thousands of messages.
Now that you have your filter created, you can then go back to the Filters and Blocked Addresses section and edit the filter as needed. For example, you can change the range to older_than:30d if you want to delete all emails older than 30 days. You can also create a new filter if you do not want to edit the existing one.
If you need to restore any of the emails that were deleted by the filter, you can go to your trash and restore them as needed. Just keep in mind that Google will delete emails from your trash after 30 days but many times this doesn’t happen, and they stay there longer or indefinitely.
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