How many unread emails do you have right now? sixty? six thousand? Well, all those messages and attachments take up space, whether they’re unread, old, or archived. And if you’re on Gmail and you’re not one of those weird people who don’t get messages in their inbox and are constantly deleting and deleting messages, you might be running out of space.
google offers users 15gb of digital storage for free. That includes everything in Gmail, Google Drive, and any uncompressed images stored in Google Photos. That’s a lot of free space, but when you fully invest in the Google ecosystem, it fills up quickly. Once you reach your data limit, you won’t be able to add anything to Google Drive or send or receive email. restrictions can come with little or no warning and leave users scrambling to free up space. here’s how to avoid finding yourself in that position.
The easiest way to free up space in gmail is to batch delete almost everything in your inbox. go to the promotions tab, or maybe social, check the box in the top left corner to select all messages, then hit delete. (It’s the button that looks like a trash can, of course).
the obvious problem with this method is that there are probably messages you want to keep. if you do a lot of your shopping online, for example, it’s good to keep your receipts. Fortunately, there are a couple of easy ways to filter through the clutter and stick with what you need.
One method, suggested by lily hay newman of wired, is to select bulk deletes by email address. Even if they come from the same company, spam messages are often sent from a different email address than really useful information, like receipts or order information. For example, PayPal sends receipts from service@paypal.com, while its marketing blasts (“sign up for PayPal credit now!”) come from paypal@mail.paypal.com. Amazon shipping information comes through shipping-tracking@amazon.com. spam comes from vfe-campaign-response@amazon.com and no-reply@business.amazon.com. As soon as you figure out which email addresses can be safely relegated, you can delete all emails from each of them without deleting the things you want to keep. just copy and paste the offending email address into the search bar and batch delete everything that comes up.
another method (this one comes from peter rubin of wired) is to sort emails by file size. In the gmail search bar, type size: 10mb (or whatever size you want) to display emails with attachments that exceed the search size. you’ll still have to review and select what you want to delete, but at least it brings all the big emails together in one place. the best thing you can do is start big and work small.
After deleting the thousands of emails you filtered, you may notice that your storage hasn’t moved. Even though you may have thrown it all away, you still have to empty the bin. Unlike your trash can, if you just leave emails in the gmail trash can, they will be deleted automatically after 30 days. but if your goal is to free up space, you better take out the trash right now. (Plus, you get a chance to verify that the important stuff was accidentally deleted.)
In gmail’s left sidebar, click “more” to expand the menu if it doesn’t already show all of your mail folders. you’re looking for our old friend, trash. once you’re looking at the trash can, go to the top of the list and click “empty trash now”. everything will vanish into the digital underworld. Finally, you can revel in all of your new space.
Still not enough space? well, gmail isn’t the only storage hog in the google suite. Google Drive and Google Photos can fill up quickly if you upload images or other files at their highest quality. if you use photos, go to your settings and make sure the quality of your upload is set to high quality instead of original. It’s counterintuitive, but high quality means the images will be compressed into google’s high resolution image format, while original means they’ll remain at the (usually better) quality you took them in. you can store unlimited high quality images in google photos, but saving the originals will take up the allotted space.
as for google drive, you can control your storage here. click “storage used” on the right hand side to filter by file size. it might also help to take a look at your “shared with me” folder. you never know when someone might have shared 4gb of very important photos.
if you can’t or won’t sacrifice image quality, or if you just have too much stuff you can’t do without, you may have to pay for more storage; As painful as it sounds, it is the best option. google charges $2 a month ($20 a year if you pay upfront) for 100gb of storage. Of course, if you want to keep your emails, photos, documents, and uploads indefinitely, you still need to pay rent for the storage space.
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