How to clear up storage in gmail

How to clear up storage in gmail
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Gmail includes 15GB of free storage, and that’s shared with Google Drive and Google Photos. Here’s how to find—and delete—the emails using the most space in your Gmail account. Try this before paying for more storage!

Google Wants You to Buy More Space

You can view how much total storage your Gmail account is using from the Google One Storage page. However, this page doesn’t let you quickly find out how to free up that space. It redirects you to Gmail and leaves you on your own.

Sure, you could start deleting emails one by one, but there’s a good chance you have tens of thousands of emails—at a minimum. That will take forever. Worse yet: Many of those emails are tiny, and you’ll barely free up space by deleting them.

Google wants you to purchase more storage in order to store all those old emails forever. But you can free yourself from those old emails and avoid that monthly bill. Here’s how.

RELATED: Why You Should Delete Emails Instead of Archiving Them

How to Find and Delete the Largest Email Messages

Gmail doesn’t actually show how much storage space each email thread uses. However, Gmail does let you search for threads by size.

To do this, search using the “size:” operator in Gmail. For example, to search for emails over 20MB in size, type the following text into the search bar and press Enter:

size:20mb

If you delete five of the email threads that appear, you’ll have freed up at least 100MB. Now you know which emails to delete to free up space as quickly as possible.

How to clear up storage in gmail

To delete an email thread, open it and click the “Delete” icon that looks like a trash icon on the toolbar. To delete multiple threads, select them using the checkboxes and click the trash icon to delete them all at once.

How to clear up storage in gmail

Work your way down the list in size—for example, “size:10mb” will show all email threads 10MB or larger in size. Be sure to empty Gmail’s trash to permanently delete the emails and free up space.

These emails will be using a lot of space because of their file attachments. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to delete a file attachment while keeping the email. If the email is important to you, you can forward it to yourself (and remove the attachment while you do so), and then delete the original. You can also print the email to PDF and then delete it. Or, if the attachments are important, you can download them and store them elsewhere before deleting the email.

How to Quickly Delete Large Numbers of Emails

There’s a good chance that you have large numbers of useless, outdated emails wasting space in your inbox. You probably don’t need to keep all those old email newsletters forever!

To quickly find and delete large numbers of useless emails, follow our tips for quickly deleting almost all your junk emails.

RELATED: How to Delete Almost All Junk Emails the Easy Way

How to Sort Your Gmail Messages by Size

If you want even more control, we recommend using an IMAP client like Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird will show you exactly how large each email thread is in your Gmail account. You can even sort by size.

Work your way down in the list by size, deleting each email you don’t need, and you can free up a lot of space in no time.

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Top 3 Ways to Clean Gmail Storage

Let’s take a closer look at the top 3 ways to clean Gmail storage. But before you put the information provided in this article to practice, we recommend you open drive.google.com/settings/storage in your browser to see a detailed breakdown of how your storage is shared across all services.

If you take the time to clean not only Gmail but also Google Drive and Google Photos, then you should be able to free up a considerable amount of space and avoid upgrading to a Google One plan, which can include anywhere from 100 GB to 30 TB of extra space.

1. Use a Bulk Email Organizer

The average size of an email message that contains nothing but plain text is just 75 KB, but most emails sent these days are much larger because they contain high-resolution images and all kinds of attachments. If you’re like most people, then you probably have a lot of emails from retailers, marketers, coworkers, friends, and family members that are no longer useful and are just taking up valuable space.

While you could go through your Gmail inbox and manually delete messages one by one (learn how to delete all emails on Gmail), it’s far more efficient to use a Gmail cleanup tool like Clean Email to clean Gmail space in one go. Clean Email can scan your entire mail account and combine messages from inbox and other folders into groups, allowing you to quickly review hundreds or even thousands of messages with a few clicks.

How to clear up storage in gmail
How to clear up storage in gmail

Here’s how to clean up Gmail storage space using Clean Email:

  1. Go to: https://app.clean.email
  2. Sign in with your mail account.
  3. Select Quick Clean from the left pane.
  4. Move to trash all email bundles that contain nothing but unwanted or useless messages.

How to clear up storage in gmail
How to clear up storage in gmail

If you would like to review a specific email bundle and perhaps deselect certain messages, then you need to click the View all button in the top-right corner.

Clean Email can group together emails from dead ends, emails older than six months, bounce and social notifications, online shopping emails, emails you replied to, unlabeled emails, and more. You can even tell this bulk email organizer to automatically delete future similar emails for you so that you never have to worry about cleaning up Gmail space again.

How to clear up storage in gmail
How to clear up storage in gmail

2. Clean Up Google Drive and Google Photos

As we’ve already explained, your storage is shared across several services. As such, you don’t necessarily have to clean Gmail space by deleting old emails. You can also delete files from Google Drive and Google Photos.

Go to the Google Account storage page for a detailed breakdown of how much space each of the three services occupies.

To delete photos and videos in Google Photos:

  1. Go to photos.google.com or open the Google Photos app on your Android or iOS device.
  2. Select any photo or video you want to delete.
  3. Click Delete → Move to bin.
  4. Open the Bin.
  5. Empty it to permanently delete your photos and videos.

To delete a file in Google Drive:

  1. Go to drive.google.com or open the Google Drive app on your Android or iOS device.
  2. Select any file you want to delete.
  3. Click Remove.
  4. Open the Bin.
  5. Empty it to permanently delete your files.

When you’re done cleaning up, go to the Google Account storage page again to see how much space you’ve managed to free up. If not enough, then continue reading this article for more tips on how to clean Gmail storage.

3. Use the Google One Storage Manager

Google is aware that many of its users are struggling with space management and not enjoying cleaning up Gmail space manually, which is why the tech giant created the Google One Storage Manager, a handy tool that lets you conveniently manage your account storage across all its services.

Using the Google One Storage Manager, you can quickly review and clear deleted emails and files, spam emails, emails with large attachments, large photos and videos, videos that Google Photos can’t process or play, and more.

Use the Google One Storage Manager on your computer:

  1. Open the Google Account storage page on your computer.
  2. Log in with your account.
  3. Click Review and clear under the category you want to manage.
  4. Select the files you want to remove.
  • You can click the Delete all button in the top-right corner to delete all files at once.
  1. After you select your files, click the Delete button in the top-right corner.
  2. Confirm that you understand that deleted files can’t be recovered.
  3. Click Permanently delete.

Use the Google One Storage Manager on your mobile device:

  1. Open the Google One app.
  2. Tap Storage → Free up account storage.
  3. Select the category you want to manage
  4. Select the files you want to remove.
  5. Tap the Delete button in the top-right corner.

As useful as the Google One Storage Manager is, it doesn’t offer nearly the same granularity when it comes to cleaning up Gmail space as Clean Email, so we recommend you don’t rely on it exclusively.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve explained three ways how to clean up Gmail storage to help you reclaim valuable space so that you can keep receiving email messages without purchasing a Google One plan to unlock extra space. We recommend you clean Gmail storage on a regular basis so that you always have at least 1 GB left and don’t have to hastily delete old emails, Google Drive files, or photos and videos stored in Google Photo.

Follow our guide to learn why your Gmail is not receiving emails.

How to Clean Up Gmail Storage - FAQs

Why is my Gmail out of storage?

Your Gmail may be out of storage for three different reasons:

1. You have too many emails in your inbox.
2. You have too many files in Google Drive.
3. You have too many photos and videos in Google Photos.

How can I free up Gmail space?

To clean Gmail space, you should first get rid of unwanted and unnecessary email messages using a bulk email organizer like Clean Email. Then, go through Google Drive and Google Photos and delete all files, photos, and videos that you don’t need.

What do I do when my Gmail storage is full?

The first thing you should do when you run out of storage is to learn how to clean up Gmail space by familiarizing yourself with the techniques described in this article. Unless you’re okay with wasting hours of your time, don’t clean Gmail storage space manually and use a bulk email organizer instead.

Will deleting emails free up storage?

Yes, deleting email will free up your Gmail storage. You can also delete files stored in Drive and photos and videos stored in Google Photos.

How much storage do I have in Gmail?

All users get to enjoy 15 GB of free space. Users can purchase additional storage by subscribing to one of several available Google One plans.

How do I free up storage on Gmail?

Delete mails * Head over to Gmail.com and log in to your Google account. * This will bring up all emails with attachments of over 10MB in size. * Select emails you do not need and tap on the delete button. * Now head to the Trash and tap on the empty trash button to free up space in your account.

What is the easiest way to clean up Gmail?

If your Gmail inbox is cluttered, overwhelming, or just poorly organized, try these steps for how to clean up your Gmail inbox:.
Delete big attachments. ... .
Delete entire categories. ... .
Unsubscribe from annoying lists. ... .
Block unwanted senders. ... .
Delete by sender. ... .
Delete by date. ... .
Delete by content. ... .
Create new labels..

Does deleting emails free up space on Gmail?

Free up space with Gmail. With the Google One Storage Management Tool, you can review and free up storage space by deleting emails in your trash, spam emails, or emails with large attachments. info Features are subject to availability.