I Had to Kill My Gmail to Save My Gmail [CNET]

How I took a shortcut straight to Inbox Zero without deleting any messages, photos or videos.

Email was my first big internet app. As a college freshman in the fall of 1990, the Mosaic browser and the World Wide Web were still a few years away, but sending digital messages was already in full swing.

After I graduated, 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 connection with other 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 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 little while 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 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 great. 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 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 killed my Gmail inbox

Jason’s Tech Tip is simple in concept but slightly more complicated to execute. The basic process involves:

1. Creating a new Gmail account
2. Transferring all of your messages from your original account to the new account
3. 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-plus emails from my original account’s Trash folder (another two or so hours) and was staring at Inbox Zero, something I’d previously believed impossible.

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 blowing it up

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.