Are you running out of Gmail storage? Here’s how you can free up space on your Gmail and also stay organized.
If you use Gmail regularly, I am sure you would have come across the dreaded ‘storage almost full’ warning. Gmail has a free limit of 15GB but this is shared across Google Drive, Photos and Gmail itself.
So, with all the years of long attachment, lengthy newsletters and promotional spam piling up, you are bound to run out of space sooner than later.
But don’t worry, here’s some good news… you don’t have to buy storage space or delete important emails. You can still free up space by following these steps:
Step 1: Check what’s taking up Space
The first thing to do is to identify what is taking up the majority of your 15GB space.
Go to Google Storage and you will see a breakdown of usage across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos.
If Photos or Drive are taking up space, you will need to empty out whatever is not needed. But if Gmail is taking up a lot of space, go to Step 2.
Step 2: Delete Large Emails & Attachments
Did you know you can search for emails based on file size? Go to the search bar and type ‘larger: 10M’ to find emails bigger than 10MB.
Go through the mails that appear and delete anything you don’t need anymore. Don’t forget to empty Trash once you’re done. The deleted emails linger in trash and still eat up space until they’re emptied out from your Trash as well.
You can repeat this exercise with smaller values like ‘larger: 5M’ and ‘larger: 2M’ if you still want to free up more space.
Step 3: Unsubscribe & Delete Promotional Emails
Promotional emails take up a lot of unnecessary space and the funny thing is that we don’t even read most of them. Go to Gmail search and type ‘category: promotions’ to filter out all promo emails.
You can now bulk delete the ones you don’t need. You can also go one step further and unsubscribe from these promotional emailers. This way you can make sure your inbox is clean and stays that way in the future as well.
Step 4: Clear Out Sent & Spam Folders
Just like in the previous step, go to the search box and type ‘in:sent has:attachment’. This way you will find a lot of emails you’ve previously sent which are not relevant anymore but are still taking up a lot of space.
Also go to the Span and Trash folders and click ‘Empty’ to permanently delete those files and free up more space.
These folders often get ignored but house a lot of unwanted and heavy files. So, emptying them out regularly is a good practice to follow.
Step 5: Use Google’s Built-In Clean Up Tool
If you’re really pressed for time, you can even check out Google’s Storage Management Tool.
This will show you all the emails with large attachments, spam and lots more in a visual format that’s easier to understand. You can delete whatever you want with just a few clicks.
The Last Word
Once you’ve cleaned up enough space, you can also set your Gmail filters to auto-archive or delete old newsletters, brand promos or system notifications. This way you don’t have to worry about storage space for a while.
Know any more tips to free up space in Gmail? Let us know in the comments section.
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