Every few months my Gmail account hovers ominously above 95% of the allowed storage quota since I’m a free user. When it first happened a few years ago, I had to do something quickly but with time, I managed to learn a few tricks to keep my Gmail under control.

Gmail provides a high storage limit (15 GB) so getting close to your storage limit shouldn’t happen too often.

Downsize

Everything in your Gmail account consumes space but start with email attachments as they eat up the largest chunk of your space.

Gmail allows you to search for messages by size. For example, enter size:4m into Gmail’s search box and you’ll see all emails 4 MB or larger. However, you’ll need a program like Thunderbird to see the size of each email thread and sort by size.

You can also search for email messages that have attachments and delete them to free up space quickly instead of going through your naturally small text emails and trying to delete some of them. To view only messages that contain attachments, use the has:attachment search filter.

Empty your trash

Emails in your trash will still take up space. Gmail will automatically delete emails from the trash folder after 30 days, but you’ll want to empty your trash immediately if you need the space right now.

You’ll find the Trash beneath the More link under your labels in the sidebar.

Remove Bulk Mail

Chances are you get a lot of bulk mail – newsletters, notifications, mailing list messages, and other things. Most of the time, this email is pretty unimportant especially the old messages.

To quickly delete bulk mail, find one of the messages, open it, click the More menu and select “Filter messages like this.”

You can easily use the check-mark menu to select all the messages and delete them, freeing up space.

Delete old emails

Text email messages too take up space. If you have thousands and thousands of emails, they can add up to a noticeable amount of space especially if you haven’t spring-cleaned your inbox in a very long time. Start by viewing the oldest emails to avoid losing important emails and delete those you don’t need to keep anymore.

Do you have any other tips for freeing up space in Gmail? Please share with us in the comments section below.