To delete one year of emails in Gmail, follow these steps:
1. Open your Gmail account and go to the search bar at the top. Click on it to activate the advanced search options.
2. In the search bar, type “older_than:1y” to search for emails older than 1 year. You can customize this by using different values such as “older_than:6m” for emails older than 6 months or “older_than:30d” for emails older than 30 days.
3. Press Enter or click the search button. Gmail will display all the emails that match your search criteria.
4. If you want to delete all the emails that appear in the search results, click the checkbox at the top left corner to select all emails on the current page.
5. Gmail will display a notification saying “All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search” (the number may vary depending on the number of emails on the page). Click on the link to select all conversations that match your search.
6. Once you have selected all the emails you want to delete, click on the trash bin icon (Delete) at the top to move them to the Trash folder.
7. To permanently delete the emails from the Trash folder, go to the left menu and click on “Trash”. Gmail will display all the emails in the Trash folder.
8. Again, if you want to delete all the emails in the Trash folder, click the checkbox at the top left corner to select all emails on the current page.
9. Gmail will display a notification saying “All 50 conversations in Trash are selected. Select all conversations that match this search” (the number may vary depending on the number of emails on the page). Click on the link to select all conversations in the Trash folder.
10. click on the trash bin icon (Delete forever) at the top to permanently delete all the selected emails from the Trash folder.
It’s important to note that deleting emails is a permanent action, and once they are deleted, they cannot be recovered. Therefore, make sure you double-check the emails you are deleting before proceeding.
Personal experience: I have used this method multiple times to clear out old and unnecessary emails from my Gmail account. It is an efficient way to declutter and free up storage space. However, I always take a moment to review the emails before deleting them permanently to ensure I don’t accidentally delete anything important.