In this tutorial you will learn how to list and delete old Gmail emails by date.
Gmail is one of the most widely used free email services worldwide. The service offers trust, stability and many features for managing messages. However, there are some functions of Gmail, which are known to a fairly small number of users. One of these features allows you to quickly access and delete old emails from Gmail.
To delete certain messages from Gmail is quite easy. Something more complicated is if you want to manually or automatically delete messages older than a certain date. For example, if you want to quickly access and delete messages older than 5 years, in this tutorial you will learn step by step how you can do this.
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How to delete old emails from Gmail (Sort by date)
Basically, this is the advanced feature that allows you to list Gmail messages by a specific date.
1. Open Gmail in the internet browser, then in the search bar type: older_than:[time period]. The time period is of the form: YYYY/MM/DD.
In my example, I listed messages older than 5 years, using the search phrase: “older_than:5y".
With "older_than:” you can search Gmail messages older than a defined number of days, weeks or years. If you want to list emails received before a certain date, then you can use the search phrase with "before:[YYYY/MM/DD]". For example, if you need to quickly find messages older than June 30, 2019, your search phrase would be: before:2018/06/30.
2. After you have listed the email messages after a certain date and you are sure that you want to delete them, check the selection of all messages, then click on "Select all conversations that match this search".
In the first phase, only the messages on the current page will be selected. By activating the "Select all conversations that match this search" option, all messages that match the search term will be selected.
3. Click on the icon "Delete” from the toolbar gmail to delete conversations older than the date indicated in the search phrase.
Search Gmail messages containing attachments older than a certain date
If you want to free up Gmail storage space, a good idea is to delete old messages that contain attachments. To do this, use the search phrase "has:attachment".
To list messages older than 5 years that contain attachments, the search expression will be of the form: has:attachment older_than:5y
These search terms (Gmail Search Operators) can only be used from the Gmail web interface. You can't use search terms in mobile apps or apps desktop.
