How to Change Gmail’s Default Notification Action to Delete

If you’d rather delete emails from Gmail from your device instead of archiving them, then let me show you where to find the setting to do exactly that.

I used to archive a lot of my emails from Gmail instead of deleting them, but then I just got to a certain point where my inbox was getting full(I’ve had my Gmail account for a long, long time). So I switched to actually deleting emails that I had no reason to keep and this helped me keep my Gmail capacity at a reasonable level(it’s 46% used right now).

So when Google added actionable notifications to its Gmail application on Android, I got excited. I had hoped that Google would let me simply delete the unwanted emails right from the notification but I only saw an Archive button.

I’m not sure if this feature was in the Gmail for Android application since the beginning, but it took me forever to find out how I could change this archive button to a delete one. The secret isn’t even much of a secret. It’s plain as day in the Settings of Gmail but it’s just not something that I thought was in there. Anytime I have set up an Android device and have wanted to mess with the setting of the Gmail application, I go into the Account Settings instead of the General Settings. So you may have already known about this feature, but I just learned about it recently so I wanted to write up a guide for it in case anyone else was curious.

So like I said, you want to launch the Gmail application and then expand the Navigation Drawer out by swiping in from the left side of the screen. Scroll and look down toward the bottom of this list of options and you’ll see one for Settings. Tap on it and then you’ll see a few options here. Go ahead and tap on the first one, which should be General Settings and then it is literally(at least for me) the first option. The name of the option is called Gmail Default Action and by default, it is set to Archive.

All you have to do is tap on this option and then you’ll get the choice to change it from Archive to Delete. Then, as you can see from the first image in this article), you’ll get a Delete button within the Gmail notification instead of the Archive one that is normally there. This has saved me so much time because I get a lot of emails from various sources and a lot of the time these can be about something I already knew about. So anytime I see something come in and I don’t need to keep it for whatever reason, I just delete it right from the Gmail notification and it takes less than a second.