Since I’ve recently re-launched the site, I’ve been going through my Road Reality Gmail account, as well as my main Gmail account… and what I noticed was disturbing. You can delete emails, but it doesn’t really delete them! Delete all you want, they’ll still show up. Using half my allotted 15GB of data, I wondered why. Then I noticed it… over 40,000 emails. No way that can be true, right?
Wrong.
It turns out that Gmail uses “Categories” to automagically group emails. Yep. Really.
And, the kicker is that even if you delete emails from your inbox, they’ll still show up, because they’re still linked to a category. If that doesn’t make your head spin, you’re smarter than me (spoiler alert: you probably are).
Here’s how to fix it:
Step 1: Hide the Categories
Click on the Gear icon to open the Settings tab, which brings up the basic Settings window.
Click “See all settings”
On the Labels tab, scroll down to Categories and select “Hide” on each one, including the main “Categories” label. This will turn off the auto-grouping in the future.
Step 2: Un-group “Conversations”:
Conversations are useful in real life, but only amount to confusion and frustration in GMail, in my opinion. In the General tab, scroll down to “Conversation View” and select “Conversation View Off”.
Step 3: Fix the Deletion Issue (POP/IMAP only):
Go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.
Under “When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted”, select “Auto Expunge Off”. This opens up the next section, which we’ll need to modify
Under “When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder:”, select “Move the message to Trash”.
Step 4: Delete the Junk Emails
Now scroll up to “System Labels” and make sure “All Mail” is set to “Show”.
“All Mail” will show up on the left-hand sidebar/list. Go in there, and it’ll not only show you how many emails you have in total, but allow you to search and clear out the junk.
Good luck!
If this helped you, or you found a better/different way to do it, let me know!
-John