We all know how it goes: one day you look at your Gmail account, and you’ve got several thousand emails. Why be surprised? It’s all too easy to subscribe to dozens of company promotions without realizing it. If you buy anything online from a new service or retailer, you will be subscribed. If you want to read an article from a source that demands registration, you will be subscribed. If you sign a petition or give money to a charitable cause, you will be subscribed. Show It is, of course, easy to ignore all those subscriptions and just let them pile up in your Gmail Promotions tab. But what if there is a really good sale at your favorite clothing retailer, and you miss it because of the mass of other promotional emails? What if you’ve got so many emails stored up that they’re starting to eat into your Google storage limits? Or what if just the thought of having several thousand promotional emails sitting in your Inbox is just, well, irritating? Sometimes it’s a good idea to spend a little time cleaning out all those excess emails in your Gmail account and preventing more from coming. Here’s how. (Note: these all require using Gmail with a browser. There is very little you can do with your mobile app; those options are listed at the end of this article.) Unsubscribe or blockGoogle has actually made it fairly easy to unsubscribe from an email subscription. Emails which are perceived by Google’s AI engine to be promotional will have a small “Unsubscribe” link next to the sender’s name on top of the email. Gmail’s AI engine marks promotional emails with an “Unsubscribe” link.Click on the link, and you’ll get a pop-up box with a blue “Unsubscribe” button. Click that, and you should soon stop getting emails from that source. (Remember that it can take a few days to get your name off a subscription list.) Once you hit “Unsubscribe,” it may take a few days before you’re removed from the list.Keep in mind that there are a lot of spammers out there that use “unsubscribe” to confirm that an email account is legitimate; responding to those could open you up to increased (rather than less) spam. Your best bet on this score is to use Gmail’s unsubscribe feature only for email from vendors you know. Any email from your Spam tab, or any that you aren’t familiar with, should be blocked instead of unsubscribed. To block a sender, simply open the email, click on the three “More” dots in the upper right corner, and click on “Block [vendor name].” Sometimes (a bit unpredictably), Gmail’s AI engine will notice you haven’t opened an email from a specific source in over 30 days and will pop up to ask you if you want to unsubscribe. By all means, take advantage of it should that occur. Delete old emailUnfortunately, unsubscribing and even blocking from a list doesn’t do anything about the several hundred emails that are still sitting in your Gmail account. Even if it’s email that’s from a company you like, sometimes you simply want to get rid of all the outdated email cluttering up your unbox. There are a variety of ways you can get rid of old emails. You can try one of the apps that claim to make it easier to clean up your inbox, but it can be just as easy to do it yourself. To get rid of an email from, say, a specific sender:
If you’re a little nervous about deleting all the emails, you can run your eyes down the list and uncheck any you don’t want to trash; you can also archive those you’re not sure about, just to get them out of your inbox. Keep in mind that the mail isn’t really gone yet; you have 30 days to go into Trash (the link is in the left column) and restore it. Using the mobile appThere isn’t a lot you can do using the mobile Gmail app. You can, of course, open any email and look for the “unsubscribe” link, which is usually at the bottom of the email. While the “unsubscribe” tab doesn’t appear on the Gmail mobile app, you can block a sender by opening the email, clicking on the three dots in the top right corner, and selecting “Block [sender name].” You can delete multiple emails by pressing on the icon for each email you want to delete and then selecting the trash can icon. Otherwise, if you’re on a mobile device, you’re better off accessing Gmail through your browser in order to perform any of these tasks. Update July 28th, 2021, 9:50AM ET: Two screenshots have been replaced to reflect a slight change in Gmail’s interface. How do I clear my Gmail subscriptions?Fortunately, there's a simple, 10-step process you can follow to clean up your Gmail inbox.. Delete big attachments. ... . Delete entire categories. ... . Unsubscribe from annoying lists. ... . Block unwanted senders. ... . Delete by sender. ... . Delete by date. ... . Delete by content. ... . Create new labels.. How do I find my subscriptions on Gmail?Open your Google Account. You might need to sign in. On the left, click Payments & subscriptions. To view a list of items, click Manage purchases, Manage subscriptions, or Manage reservations.. Track a delivery.. Renew a subscription.. Cancel a reservation.. How do I unsubscribe from all promotional emails in Gmail?Access your Gmail account at gmail.com, click on the wheel, and then settings (you may need to click on “all settings”, first, before the tabs will appear). Click on Inbox. Remove the checkmark from promotions. Click on Save Settings at the bottom of the screen and brace yourself for impact.
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