I’ve been creating lots of folders [labels] in Gmail to organize my email from a client, but we’re no longer working together. How can I delete my unneeded labels?
I’m pretty sure that Google confused a lot of people when it opted to implement what it calls “labels” rather than the more traditional folders in the Gmail email system. It still confuses people, because the analog equivalent of email is physical mail, a letter printed on a piece of paper. When you’re done with it, you have to put it somewhere, right? So what’s wrong with a folder that has a description, like “expenses” or “letters from mom” or “client X”?
Built around a sophisticated and massively capable database, Gmail instead works with a more digital age metaphor of a box where you toss every letter you receive, but those letters magically also duplicate in other boxes as appropriate. You can then find the messages you seek in any of multiple places, not just the one. Wrap your head around it and suddenly it’s way smarter and more capable! I am quite a convert myself, and my Gmail account has over 50 different labels so I can file and organize my email archives.
Which leads to the observation that you don’t really “need” to ever delete a label. In fact, if you delete a label in Gmail, not a single email message will be deleted as a consequence. Not one. Because, remember, all email just sits in that big main box labeled “Archive”.
From an aesthetic sense, however, it’s quite reasonable to want to prune your list of email labels in Gmail to just make your life easier and avoid confusion as time passes and you add yet more labels. So let’s look at how do delete a label, but with the understanding that it doesn’t delete even one message along the way.
To start, you know how to create labels, right? It’s a menu option right off the “label” button on the top of every Gmail page:
You access all email messages that match a specific label by searching for “label:” followed by the name of the label. As you start typing, Gmail will suggest matching labels so you should never have to actually type the whole thing in.
Of course, messages can have more than one label, as shown:
Here I’m looking at messages tagged with “deleteme” (a test label, obviously) and you can see almost all of them have at least one additional label too. Remember: Every single email message lives in the Gmail archive and has zero or more labels.
And now it’s time to travel to the most poorly designed part of Gmail: Settings and Preferences. You can get there easily enough by clicking on the gear icon on the top right of any Gmail page, then choosing “Settings“:
There are quite a few ‘tabs’ of settings, and you’ll want to choose “Labels”:
Once you move to labels, every single label is listed along with a few things you can change for each.
Let’s have a closer look at “DeleteMe”:
Notice it shows that there are 7 conversations (emails with zero or more follow-on messages), and that I can show or hide this particular label. Perhaps simply hiding the label will do what you seek? If not, you can edit the label to rename it as appropriate (click “edit“), or you can, yes, “remove” it by clicking remove.
The latter produces a warning message:
Read that closely: not a single email message will be deleted. Not one, even if your label applies to thousands of messages. However, it will vanish from every message that’s been tagged with that label and the label itself will vanish from the list of options you have. Easy.
Ready to proceed? Just click on the blue “Delete” button. Done.
To echo the last reply from last year, you did not answer the question. There are tons of tutorials (even on Google’s own pages) that tell you how to delete a label. However, I cannot find any place that describes how to actually delete the messages in a large tree of labels. From what I can tell, it is a severe limitation of GMail. And, before anyone says “Why do you need to delete them? Just leave them in the archive.”, let me say that answer is short-sighted and ignorant of how some people work. We’re using GSuite, and during the email migration, I had a PST import fail 3 times before working. The migration tool would not pick up where it left off, so I had to rename the label tree to “Failed…” and start over. So, I have many GB of duplicate and incomplete message folders/labels that I need to eradicate. If I don’t, then searching takes much longer (yes, Gmail gets slow over 50GB of messages). Also, when I do search for legitimate emails, I get 4 of each message… which is non-ideal to say the least. Can anyone help, or is the answer just “Get over it Gmail is amazing even though it can’t do simple things like delete emails in sub-label trees”?
Sorry you’re so seemingly frustrated with this situation, Samuel. You can delete thousands of messages with a single label pretty easily in Gmail on the computer (not the mobile version). Search for the label — like “label:deleteme” — then above the list of matches, click on the checkbox. A window will pop up above the list offering “All xx conversations on this page are selected. Select all XXX conversations in DELETEME?”. Choose that, then choose delete from the menu along the top and boom! Deleted. Dozens, hundreds or thousands of email messages. Done.
Just want to sincerely thank you! I’ve needed to clean up my Inbox folders/labels for years and just didn’t know how to do it until reading your very detailed and clear message. Thanks again!
Oh, for C______’s sake, I just figured it out…individually within each bunch of emails under a label…hit the box that picks out All conversations, then delete. Sorry for the bother. THEN I can go and delete the label!
I’m sorry, but you didn’t answer the question, how to delete all messages under a label. I am a realtor and have a label for each client and sometimes hundreds of emails under that label. House is closed, people moved away, 2 years later I really don’t need those conversations and the label. I see how to delete label, but not how to delete the whole bunch of emails attached to that label.