As you may know, Google only allows 15 gigabytes of free cloud storage. This storage is used by other services such as Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail. It is natural for the numerous emails in your Gmail inbox to consume this space without you realizing. If you want to see how much space those emails are taking up, you can simply visit the Google Storage page to see it clearly.
Google informs you of the space usage, but does not guide you on how to save space if you are running out. This is because Google wants you to purchase more storage capacity to accommodate more emails and keep old ones forever. However, purchasing is optional; you can manage with the free space by clearing out the space used by old emails. Here’s how.
How to delete large emails
Although Google does not allow us to see the space occupied by each email in Gmail, it does allow us to sort emails by size. This means you can write “size” in the search field followed by the highest size you expect for emails. For example, if you want to find sent or received emails with 10 megabytes in size, you can type (size: 10mb) without the brackets in the search bar to display emails taking up more than 10MB. After that, you will see the emails taking up this space in the list as shown above. By deleting ten of the emails that appear here, you will have saved at least 100 megabytes of free space.
To delete an email, simply click on it and then click on the “delete” icon resembling a trash can on the toolbar. If you prefer to delete multiple emails at once, you can check the box next to each email or select all, then click on the trash icon on the top toolbar. This method will save you a significant amount of space depending on the number of emails you have and free up this space for more important things. Make sure to empty the Gmail trash to delete emails permanently and free up space, by going to the Trash folder and clicking on “Delete Forever”.
Now if you’re wondering, what makes an email consume more than 10 or 20 megabytes? The reason is the attachments embedded in the email, which could be files, images, or videos. There is currently no easy way to delete attachments only from the email while retaining the text. However, if retaining the text is important, you can forward the email to yourself and remove the attachments while doing so, then delete the original. You can also download the email as a PDF file and then delete it.
Also, note that you can always download an email client program like Thunderbird and manage Gmail messages through it. These programs give you more control over messages, including the ability to know the size of each message individually.
