I’m what I’d call a power Gmail user, including lots of filters and such. What I’ve noticed recently, however, is that some of the folders I’m using (I think Gmail calls them “labels”) are empty. I’d like to delete them. What’s the fastest way to do so?
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?
QUESTIONS:
1)how to delete a label in GMAIL?
2)how can I find my last password for my Gmail Account?
THANKS IN ADVANCE
How can I delete a folder (label) that i created without having the requisite “settings” gear wheel in my tool box?
I have a label that will not disappear, removing it does nothing, removing using an IMAP email client creates another one with a pre-fix of GMail/Trash and leaves the original one there. Renaming it within GMail settings just creates an additional label and then leave sthe original there and I didn;t even create this label.
It appeared when somehow I agreed to GMail accessing my hotmail when I upgraded to w10, I have since separated the 2 accounts but cannot get rid of these 2 labels.
Any suggestions
What appeared as a daunting task was solved with in a matter of minutes.
thanks sir.
yours faithfully
arulalan
Thanks so much for this tutorial. I’ve been frustrated for over a year trying to delete labels and after reading this, they were gone in a matter of minutes. Thanks again!
Your reply was very user friendly and helpful if I were at a computer, my inquiry was, “How do I delete a label from gmail on my iPhone?” Any ideas there? Hopefully as simple as your other answer, out of town, away from PC, and knew about how to change archiving to trash, but memory is being vastly used up by these old “Labels,” I just want an easy way to delete ENTIRE label and its ENTIRE contents, instead of one by one etc. thank you for your kind consideration and speedy response. Also if you know how to do same with old hotmail folders (now called Outlook, I would most certainly be a very, “happy camper!” Thank you again so much, out of town for extended period due to mother’s poor health. Thanks ever so much, Mimi.
Thank you! I had a gmail “folder/label” since 2013 NCAA playoffs that was now empty and didn’t know how to delete it. The other HOW TO’s were a bunch of elitist nerds. People were asking the same question I had, how to delete the gmail “folder”. And the elitists were just responding with “there is no such thing as a gmail folder”, etc.
Thank you. Your advice was quick and easy.
I agree with you about the “elitists”. At what point do normal, helpful people become preachy, condescending snobs?