How do I delete a Google Gmail Folder Label?

It's always a pleasure to get a question from a power Gmail user. I have used Gmail since I could wrangle an invitation to the beta period. The oldest message in my Gmail account is from April, 2004. Sheesh, almost eight years ago! In that time I've archived 47,101 messages and probably deleted at least twice as many. That's a lot of email!

You're right that while the Gmail team talks about labels from a keyword tagging perspective, the reality is that for all practical purposes you can think of them as email folders. Set up a filter properly and you can have all messages from a specific address pushed into that particular folder without ever hitting your primary inbox, for example. So why do they still call them "labels"? I guess it's that database-driven culture inside the Googleplex.

Ah well, whatever you call it, it's definitely fairly straightforward to manage your labels / folders, and it can all be done from within your Mail Settings.

Start there by clicking on the gear wheel on the top right:

Now click on the "Labels" option on the top tab:

Turns out there are a number of interesting things you can do with your labels, one of which I didn't realize we had control over: whether the label shows up if there are no new messages in that silo or not. Check it out:

You'll notice that I have "Autopay" set up to "hide" regardless of whether there are new messages therein or not. "show if new" is a smarter alternative, of course, because if I do have messages that automatically route into that folder, I'll never see them. Not good.

In fact, however, I'm redoing my filters and am going to just delete the Autopay label, just as you've indicated you want to delete some of your unused labels. To do that I find the label on the list then click on "Remove" on the right side...

A click of the "Delete" button and it's gone.

Now, don't forget to check that your filters aren't now messed up before you're done. It should theoretically remove any filters that would label messages for an undefined label, but then again, maybe it shouldn't. Better to let us users figure it out, right?

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