How to set how many days worth of emails are synchronized between your Gmail and your android device / phone

Last Updated on February 18, 2023

Android phones sometimes get clogged up with a lot of mail, especially if users are new to Gmail and have just transferred all their mail from another email program, here’s how to minimise this issue.  For the purposes of this tutorial the blocky red bits are my attempt to hide my personal email address from you.

NOTE – all version of Android are slightly different, so your screens might look a little different and your options might be in a slightly different place.

Go into the Gmail app, press your menu button, then ‘more’ then  ‘settings’ then click on the account you want to change.

Scroll down until you see the ‘Sync inboxes and labels’ button

Using this screen you can click to set the amount of mail you want to sync for each part of your Gmail account.   I recommend just changing the top option to keep things simple

Here’s what the box for setting the number of days to sync looks like.