How I Blew Up My Gmail Inbox and Learned to Love Email Again [CNET]

My Gmail inbox had devolved into a nightmare of unread messages. Transferring them all let me start over fresh without losing any memories.

Email was my first killer app. In my dorm’s residential computer cluster during my initial weeks of college (back in September 1990), my eyes glazed over during the HyperCard presentation (“who’s gonna use that?!”), but I was laser-focused when the talk shifted to setting up my email account.

After a quick setup, I was able to instantly communicate with my favorite high school friends and my older brother on the other side of the country. I’m not much of a phone talker, so being able to stay in touch with longtime friends and relatives was a comforting balance to moving 2,000 miles away to a school where I knew no one.

As a young adult, I set up email using my ISP, but I eventually gravitated to free email services like Rocketmail and later Yahoo, mostly because of convenience, ease of use and their connection to online services like fantasy sports leagues. 

After Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, I grabbed an invite as soon as I could and picked a short username. I’d seen how quickly Google Search overtook Yahoo and HotBot in the ’90s, and I was sure Gmail would do the same for web-based email.

I wasn’t wrong. A clean interface, conversation view, powerful search features, spam filtering and a generous 1GB storage limit quickly helped propel Gmail to web-based email dominance, where it still sits. Gmail accounts for the vast majority of webmail users.

Gmail has served me very well over the past two decades, but there’s been a sea change in recent years — more unwanted advertising emails, more messages duplicated in phone texts (Remind messages from my kids’ schools, for example) and most important, many more “Unread” messages. 

Just a few weeks ago, I was facing 14,893 unread emails with no idea how I would ever clear them out. (Believe it or not, I know people with much higher numbers.) I was also receiving my first Google storage warnings, as my Gmail was taking up about 12GB of Google’s total 15GB storage limit.

With little hope of cleaning up my Gmail account, I started avoiding it completely. Some official messages were echoed in texts to my phone, but many emails obviously weren’t, and I started missing high-priority communications (like invites from my local poker group).

When my colleague Jason Chun pitched a Tech Tip about how to transfer all of your Gmail messages to a new account to free up storage space, I immediately jumped at the chance to help out and get a clean email account in return.

After a few hiccups and a little web research, Jason’s tip worked like gangbusters. All of my Gmail messages transferred successfully to a new Google “archive” account, and my original Gmail account was returned to brand-new status.

Clearing out my messages to free up storage space was reason enough to make the move, but what happened next surprised me. I started writing and reading emails again. I wrote to my parents. I wrote to friends who I haven’t heard from in years. I started interacting with my kids’ PTA groups, organizations I’d been heavily involved with and had neglected recently.

Email was back as my killer web app, and I had no idea how much I had missed it. 

How I cleaned out my Gmail inbox

Jason’s Tech Tip is simple in concept but slightly more complicated to accomplish. The basic process involves: a) creating a new Gmail account; b) transferring all of your messages from your original account to the new account; c) deleting the old messages from your original account.

The result for me is a new “archive” Gmail account chock-full of 20 years of messages and an original account that’s completely empty (with a few exceptions).

Backing up and transferring more than 75,000 Gmail messages wasn’t quick — it took about two days total, mostly for the POP3 transfer of emails on Google’s back end. But once the transfer completed, I deleted those 75,000+ emails from my original account’s Trash folder (another 2 or so hours) and was staring at Inbox Zero.

The only problem we encountered when shifting all of my Gmail messages to a new archive account came when setting up the POP3 transfer. Gmail kept asking for my Google password … and kept telling me it was “Invalid” after I entered it.

After a misguided detour into “less secure” apps, we realized that we needed to create a Google app password to allow the POP3 mail transfer. These 16-digit passcodes are shown only once and require accounts to have two-step verification enabled. Once we figured out the app password step, the rest of the process went smoothly. Check out Jason’s explainer for all the details.

How I’ve kept my Gmail at Inbox Zero since the transfer

Along with writing more emails, I’ve also found that a clean Gmail inbox has made it much easier to pare down and organize the emails I receive. Twitter/X or Reddit notifications? Unsubscribe. Nextdoor alerts? Unsubscribe. Disc Golf Course Review forum activity? Hmm … I’ll keep those under a new “Disc golf” label.

While the Primary tab of my Gmail inbox has received emails at a manageable pace, and the Social tab was mostly handled by unsubscribing from Twitter/X and NextDoor, the Promotions and Updates tabs have been much more active, requiring a bit more attention.

Most promotional emails will have an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom, or an “Email preferences” link that you can visit to customize which emails you receive or stop them all together. Once you’ve unsubscribed, click the three-dot menu in the top right of your email message, select “Filter messages like this,” then hit the blue “Search” button to get a list of emails from that sender that you can delete all at once.

Some senders will take a bit of time before incorporating your requests to unsubscribe. If you have a persistent sender that doesn’t seem to be honoring your request to stop the emails, set up a Gmail filter to automatically direct those messages to your Trash folder.

It will definitely take some time post-transfer to unsubscribe from all the mailing lists you want to stop, but dealing with tens of emails should be much easier than eliminating tens of thousands of emails.

Blowing up your Gmail inbox might not be a great idea for every Gmail user. Now all of my old communications, including attached files, photos and videos, are located in a new account. And I’ll need to use that account at least once every two years to prevent everything in it from being deleted by Google.

For me, the Gmail transfer process has been a big wake-up call. I can now not only effectively use my personal email account without suffering a case of the howling fantods, but I actually enjoy email again, and I’m even a little excited about it. If only there were other easy ways for me to feel 18 years old again!