Declutter your Gmail in 3 Easy Steps

There is a current trend for decluttering which I love – I think having less clutter in our lives and surviving with less ‘stuff’ is hugely beneficial in so many ways. I recently found that whilst I was reducing the number of items in my home, there was one area of my life where things were continuing to build up… my Gmail account. I have never been the type of person who gets their inbox down to zero unread messages. I seem to be subscribed to every mailing list going and I just keep letting emails pile up. This is embarrassing to admit but until I just did a mass decluttering I had over 6,000 unread emails! It’s scary how quickly they build up to the point that dealing with them seems like an overwhelming task. I was also terrified that I would miss an important email amongst all the non-important stuff. Well, the good news is that I was able to declutter my inbox in only three easy steps and it didn’t take all that long to do. Read on to find out how you can declutter your Gmail too.

Step 1

In the search bar, search for the word ‘unsubscribe’ – this will highlight all the newsletters/mailing lists that you are subscribed to. Here’s a snippet of what came up for me when I did this – note the time stamps, I have had over 10 newsletter/mailing list emails so far today and it’s not even 11am! Time to get decluttering!

Step 2

Click on an email you would like to unsubscribe from. I’ll start at the top and pick Argos.

You see that ‘unsubscribe’ link next to the sender’s address? Click it and confirm via the pop up. This means you will no longer receive any more emails from that sender. Hurrah! But there is one more important step to complete – you need to delete all the old messages otherwise your inbox will still be bursting at the seams. Note: if you don’t see the word ‘unsubscribe’ next to the sender’s address it will be elsewhere in the email, usually at the very bottom.

Step 3

Copy the address from the email you just opened – in this case I am copying ‘mail@mail.argos.co.uk’ and then paste it into the search bar. Here were the first few results for me when I did this:

Do you see the first square box directly underneath the magnifying glass? Click it – this will highlight all the emails. Then just simply click the trash can icon to delete them – you may need to repeat this several times if you have lots of emails from the same sender than span over more than one page.

Well done – you have now removed yourself from a mailing list and stopped yourself getting further emails. All you need to do now is repeat this process for every sender you no longer want to hear from. I like to try and do 10 or so senders in one go a few times a week.

I hope this has helped you declutter your Gmail! Best of luck!