Managing Trash and Spam

Trash

Email is permanently deleted 30 days from the day the message is put into the Trash label. This time period can not be changed. If you need to move messages out of your Inbox, but think you may need to hold on to them, you can check out our page on creating Gmail labels.

Spam

Quarantine summary reports are not available in Gmail. Check your Spam label to make sure nothing listed in that label is there by mistake. Spam will automatically be deleted after a message has been in the Spam label for 30 days.

Managing Spam in Your Inbox

If you find an email that is spam in your inbox, you can mark it as spam by:

1. Open Gmail.

2. Selecting the message you'd like to label as spam by clicking the checkbox.

3. Click the spam button in the toolbar above your emails.

   1. If you have the message open, you can also report it as spam by using the same spam button.

Gmail’s spam detection technology learns from your input. The more you label an email as spam (or not spam), the more effective the Gmail spam filtering process becomes.

Moving the Trash and Spam Label

If you have many labels, you may need to scroll down to see the Trash or Spam. You can drag and drop the Trash and Spam labels up towards the top of your list of labels on the left-hand side. When dragging the labels up, you can let go or "drop" them once you are up near your Inbox label. This will arrange them at the bottom of the list of Gmail-specific labels and just above any labels created by you.