Comment by reify

Like you my friend had 15,000 emails she had accumulated over a 5 year period in her gmail account from signing up to everything.

This made her google account full and she kept getting warnings and received no new emails. I am not a google user so forgive my random language and misunderstandings.

I tried to delete them for her from her phone, but you can only delete 30 emails at a time in the app.

I then got her to sign in to her gmail from her browser. Again it is not easy to delete 15,000 emails when you can only delete a certain amount (100) each time.

I could only do it by using rules in the search box.

older_than:4y

This deleted all emails over 4 years old.

I then did, older_than:3y, older_than:2y, and older_than:1y

So she was left with a years worth of emails.

I searched for say: "Next", to show all the emails from "Next".

I slowly went through them and unsubscribed, then deleted all the emails acssociated with "Next".

I did this for all the companies she had signed up to.

It took a long afternoon but eventually I managed to reduce her emails down to a manageable 150.

I have set her up a Protonmail account and redirected all her gmail to protonmail. And taught her about good email hygeine.

Protonmail now has an Unsubscribe button. Transfer the mailing list emails to the unsubscribe folder and unsubscribe from all the emails in the unsubscribe box.

Unsubscribing is a nightmare, just trying to find the intentionally hidden, link at the botton when you are as old and as blind as me is a testing task.