These Gmail searches can clean up even the messiest inbox

A lot of us receive loads of email but really never get the time to go through everything. Most especially in our spam folder and some of those emails may actually be important to us, but since it's in the spam folder, we just ignore it or worse delete all of them.

Luckily, Gmail has appropriately powerful search functions to help you find what’s important in your inbox and weed out the rest. Here are several search functions you can use to organize and clean out your inbox.

Find important mail

An easy way to cut through spammy messages is to type “is:important” into the search bar. This will give you a list of all emails marked with the yellow arrow of importance — which Google’s algorithms automatically add to any email from an address to which you consistently respond.

Since it’s an algorithm, it’s not perfect. If you’re looking for mail from particular senders and don’t trust Google to mark their mail as important, you can use the search term “from: [name],” either by itself or in conjunction with the “important” search operator.

Delete your oldest messages

If you’ve got a really large inbox, going all the way back to your oldest messages can be quite tiring. When you search for messages using “after: [date],” “before: [date],” “older: [date],” or “newer: [date],” you can see the messages more easily. To delete them, use the select all box in the top left of the interface, and trash them all.

Unsubscribe to newsletters

I get signed up for tons of newsletters — all anyone needs is my email, and suddenly my inbox is flooded with ads for cheap products and services that I’ve never really looked at. To get rid of them, I use “label:^unsub.”

This search function will show you all the newsletters which have unsubscribe options buried at the bottom, allowing you to start unsubbing en masse.

Delete large files

Gmail’s space is generous, but not unlimited. If you find you’re starting to bleed cloud storage space, you can delete emails which take up too much room.

To find them, use the command “size:” followed by the minimum size in bytes to find the size hogs hiding in your inbox. In my case, the whoppers were several image-heavy newsletters buried in the middle of my inbox.

Find your photos

If you have contacts that frequently send you photos, you can save them from drowning between spam by searching for “filename:” followed by the format of your choice.

This method can also be used to look up any kind of file, such as “filename: pdf,” “filename: gif,” or “filename: word.” You can even use it to find files by name.

Extra bit

Google has a list of its basic search option, including ones we didn't cover here. If you have any favorites that help you manage your inbox, tell us about them in the comments.

Image Credits : errorfixer.co