Many of us get to a point where our accounts are starting to fill up. In most cases, storage on Google Drive is actually taking up more room, but cleaning up emails that aren’t needed anymore is a great start.

For your email search and cleaning project, I found this:

In the search bar, you can type out your request in this format, or look below for an example:

before:YYYY/MM/DD

In my test, this didn't work EXACTLY right because it managed to still rope in an email from 2018 and 2020.  I'm not sure what caused that, but it did grab a bunch of the emails from 2017 and earlier.

Down below, you can select the checkmark at the top of the list, and that will select everything on the page.  You'll notice to the right (underlined in red) that this only selects the first 50 of "many" emails in my case, and it may be the same for you.  You can then click on the blue text that I've underlined in green which selects all the rest of the emails that are captured in this search listed as the "many".  When you click on the trash icon to delete them all, it'll take a while, but Gmail will start processing that request.

IMPORTANT: there is another way to clean up your account some and free up some of that storage space.  This is my preferred method.  Find an email that is impersonal, like from a mailing list.  A lot of these emails contain out of date information that isn't useful anymore.  You can right click on that email and select "Find emails from [that sender]", in the example below it's from Square Reports:

It'll give you a search result with all of the emails from that sender all at once, and you can then delete all of those emails that don't matter anymore.  You can then repeat the steps with other meaningless emails to free up space, and you won't have to touch any personal emails that were sent to you (which might have some nice memories).

I hope that helps with your email clutter!