Delete messages in Gmail

To clean up your inbox, delete messages one at a time or by specific categories. Deleted messages move from your inbox to your trash.

Important: When you delete a draft, you can't recover them.

If you delete a message within 30 days, you can:

Recover your messages from your trash.
Manually delete messages permanently from your trash, but you can’t restore them.

After 30 days:

Delete one or more messages

Important: To group messages together as a conversation, turn on conversation view.

An animation showing how to delete all messages in your Gmail inbox or another category on your computer

On your computer, go to Gmail.
On the left, select a category. For example:
- Inbox
- Promotions
- All mail
To select all messages on the current page, at the top left, above your messages, check the Select box.
- Above your messages, a notification shows the number of selected conversations on the current page. For example: "All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 2,000 conversations in Inbox."
- To select all conversations, click the link in the notification.
At the top, click Delete .

To delete specific emails, enter a search operator in the search bar.

For example, you can search for:

Tip: To delete all messages in your trash, in the notification at the top, click Empty Trash now.

An animation showing how to move messages from your Gmail trash to another location on your computer