How to get rid of promotional emails with Gmail

We all know how it goes: one day you look at your Gmail account and you have several thousand emails. Why be surprised? It’s easy to subscribe to dozens of company promotions without realizing it. If you buy something online from a new service or retailer, you will be subscribed. If you want to read an article from a source that requires registration, you will be subscribed. If you sign a petition or give money to a charity, you will be subscribed.

Of course, it’s easy to ignore all of those subscriptions and let them pile up in the Gmail Promotions tab. But what if there is a very good sale at your favorite clothing store and you lose it due to lots of other promotional emails? What if you have so many emails stored that you are starting to consume your Google storage limits? Or what if the thought of having several thousand promotional emails in your inbox is simply irritating?

Sometimes it’s a good idea to spend a little time cleaning up all the excess emails in your Gmail account and preventing more from arriving. That’s how. (Note: All of this requires 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 block

Google has made it quite easy to unsubscribe from an email subscription. Emails that Google’s AI engine considers promotional will have a small “Unsubscribe” link next to the sender’s name at the top of the email.

Click on the link and you will get a popup box with a blue “Unsubscribe” button. Click on that, and you should soon stop receiving emails from that source. (Remember that it may take a few days to get your name off a subscription list.)

Be aware that there are many spammers who use “unsubscribe” to confirm that an email account is legitimate; Responding to those could open you up to an increase (rather than less) in spam. Your best bet on this score is to use Gmail’s unsubscribe feature only for email from providers you know. Any email from your Spam tab, or anyone you are unfamiliar with, should be blocked rather than unsubscribed.

To block a sender, simply open the email, click the three “More” dots in the upper right corner, and click “Block [vendor name]. “

Sometimes (a little unpredictable), Gmail’s AI engine will notice that you haven’t opened an email from a specific source in over 30 days and will appear asking if you want to unsubscribe. Of course, take advantage of it if that happens.

Delete old mail

Unfortunately, unsubscribing and even blocking a list do nothing about the hundreds of emails still in your Gmail account. Even if it’s an email from a company you like, sometimes you just want to get rid of all the outdated emails cluttering your inbox.

There are several ways to get rid of old emails. You can try one of the apps that claim it’s easier to clean up your inbox, but it can be just as easy to do it yourself.

To get rid of an email from, for example, a specific sender:

• Enter the sender’s name in your search box.
• If the sender’s name is too general or may appear in other emails, open one of the emails in question, copy the email address and paste it into the search box.
• If you want to make sure you only receive emails, you can type “From:[sender]”O” From:[email address]Instead. You can also click the arrow to the right of the search field and use any of those fields to search for the emails you want to delete.
• You should get a list of all the emails you received from that sender. Click the square box in the upper left corner of your email list. This will mark all emails on that page. You can then click the “trash” icon on the trash can to send all emails to the trash.

• If you have more than 50 emails in your search list, after clicking the small box, you will see a message at the top of the list that says: “The 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search. ” The latter is a link; click on that and all email from that sender will be selected.
• You will get a typical “Are you sure you want to do this?” message. If you are sure, go ahead and click “OK”.

If you’re a little nervous about deleting all emails, you can take a look at the list and uncheck the ones you don’t want to discard; You can also archive those you’re unsure about, just to get them out of your inbox. Note that the mail is not really gone yet; You have 30 days to go to the Trash (the link is in the left column) and restore it.

Using the mobile app

There is not much you can do with the Gmail mobile app. Of course, you can open any email and look for the “unsubscribe” link, which is usually found at the bottom of the email.

Although the “unsubscribe” tab does not appear in the Gmail mobile app, you can block a sender by opening the email, clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner and selecting “Block [sender name]. “

You can delete multiple emails by pressing the icon for each email you want to delete and then selecting the trash icon.

Otherwise, if you are on a mobile device, it is better to access Gmail through your browser to perform any of these tasks.