Gmail Storage Full? How to Quickly Fix the Issue [Guide] – TechPP

according to google, the 15gb of free storage offered should be more than enough for the average person who receives emails on a daily basis. well, when you discover that “average” isn’t exactly a word that defines your personality, or your inbox, problems arise. Filling 15GB of space with just emails is no easy task, but we’ve found it happens, and usually to people who don’t know why their gmail storage is getting full.

technically, when your google mail inbox is almost full, gmail will bounce all incoming emails and prevent the owner from sending new messages while fully controlling the situation. so full gmail accounts become useless due to storage issues, and there are only some good suggestions to get it working again.

gmail is full? no problem

In practice, some storage space can be reclaimed simply by deleting trash, spam, old newsletters, and useless emails, which sounds simpler in theory than in reality. However, considering that gmail can usually only be filled with thousands of emails, it will be quite difficult to distinguish important letters from useless junk, small items from large attachments, etc. To avoid spending weeks on this task, we have a couple of tips to help you:

1. start by analyzing the storage space

It is essential to analyze the space distributions of google drive, gmail and google photos so that you can manage the storage space of your gmail account. gmail storage is parsed as follows:

When you go to the disk storage page and select “view details”, you will see your total storage and used storage as seen here:

Having identified which service uses the most storage, you can configure the service accordingly. so if you want to free up space with that service, you can.

2. make use of google storage management tool

The storage management page can give you a good overview of what’s taking up space. Using this screen, you can review deleted email messages that you haven’t deleted yet, spam, attachments, and large files.

by clicking on each item, you can review what google thinks you might want to remove and you can decide whether to remove them individually or all at once.

This can only help you so far, so let’s proceed to handle this more surgically.

3. clean inbox

Over time, we’ve learned that cleaning your inbox takes a lot of time, especially when you don’t even know where to start. Depending on the case, you’ll need to figure out for yourself which are the most important items in your inbox and which entries you should or shouldn’t keep.

A good first tactic would be to use a third-party service to find really big emails, which usually take up most of your inbox. In my case, I found that around 3% of my emails were taking up around 77% of my total storage space, so the first thing I did was delete these giants.

To accomplish this easily, we strongly recommend using find big mail; a service that also appears in our roundup of gmail productivity tools. all you have to do is navigate to the official website, enter the email address in the top section and wait a couple of minutes for the magic to finish. At the end, your gmail account will contain a couple of new labels, filled with your largest emails, sorted by size.

update: unfortunately finding large mail is not working for now. but we have you covered with workarounds. so read on.

As a backup, you can also search for emails manually based on their size, using the gmail search box. here are a couple of predefined strings to help you in your search, which can be inserted into the search query:

• larger:5m – will find email messages larger than 5mb
• older_than:1y – will find messages larger than 1 year old

Also, to find only emails that contain attachments (these are usually the largest ones), you can use the following queries:

• has:attachment – find emails with attachments
• from:me label:sent – can be added to distinguish sent emails

After you find the emails that look suspiciously large, go through the list and see if any are worth saving. if not, just use the select all box and delete them all. From now on, you can save a little more space by emptying your Junk and Spam folders or by manually browsing through the entries and deleting the ones that aren’t useful.

4. forward emails to a new account

Perhaps one of the easiest methods to get rid of an entire gmail account is to create a completely new one and move all your old messages there. Of course, this means that you will have to search for old messages from a completely new address. Your contacts will need to be exported to search properly, but at least you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of a gmail account once again, without paying any fees and without having to tell people you created a new address.

This is what you need to do:

1. Sign up for a completely new Google account.
2. On the old account, click on the Settings wheel (upper right-hand corner) and then on the actual Settings button.
3. Now from the upper menu, go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP menu and enable POP for all email, if it’s not already done. Then, from the dropdown section, chose to delete Gmail’s copy, just like in the picture below.
4. On the newer account, browse once more to Settings and go for the Accounts and Import menu.
5. Now click on the “Add a POP3 mail account you own” button and complete the required fields with your old email address (filled in full), account name and password. Leave all remaining options as shown and complete the process by pressing on the Add Account button.
6. Wait for Google to transfer all emails onto the new account (this may take even hours, depending on the number of existing emails) and once the process is done, login onto your old Gmail address.
7. Go to the trash section and delete all emails, to have once again a fresh new Inbox.

5. move inbox locally

Another alternative would be to manually move all your existing emails locally on the computer. To do this, we’ll need to once again enable popup forwarding on the current gmail account, and also set up a third-party email handler to download all your emails. at the end of this process all existing emails will be removed from google inbox and stored on pc.

1. once you’re logged in to your google mail account, click the settings wheel and then the settings button.
2. go to the forwarding section and pop /imap and enable pop for all mail by selecting the first radio button.
3. In the dropdown menu, choose delete copy of gmail and then click the save changes button.
4. using a local email client, such as microsoft outlook, apple mail, windows mail, thunderbird or others, manually download all your emails to the local pc. To do this, Google has a couple of guides adapted to each client. just click here and select the client of your choice.

after following these steps make sure to empty the trash section of your gmail account because it now contains all your old messages. also, after some time, you can repeat these steps to transfer even more messages to the local client.

6. archive gmail emails with google takeout

The google takeout feature can help users to free up some gmail storage space by archiving gmail emails in a particular file format and saving them on the system drive.

To do this, visit the google takeout page, log in with your gmail account, select the mailbox, choose the backup frequency as export once and create the export. once the data is ready, you can download it to your pc.

7. clean google drive and google photos

Still not enough space? well, gmail is not the only service taking up your storage space. Google Drive and Google Photos can fill up quickly if you upload images or other files at their highest quality. so check your settings on google photos and make sure your upload quality is set to high quality instead of original.

Similarly, you can control your google drive account storage here. you can filter by file size by clicking “storage used” on the right side. Also consider checking out the “shared with me” folder which also adds to your storage space.

Please note that Google Drive stores older versions of files, and these may consume additional space. Depending on how much you’ve edited the files, you may have older versions taking up your storage space. the previous version of a file can be found by right-clicking on the file and selecting manage revisions. delete an older version and free up some space by clicking the x button.

8. pay for more storage

When all of the above has helped, but not enough, the ultimate solution is to pay for more storage. After Google unified its email solution with other popular services like Google Drive and Google Photos, paying for more email storage will also mean an upgrade to your cloud account.

Currently, Google offers 15GB of free built-in storage that can be upgraded to 100GB for $1.99/month (or $19.99/year) and up to 30TB for $149.99/month with google one bouquet. There are also other storage options like 100GB, 200GB, 2TB, 10TB, and 20TB.

frequently asked questions

In this section, we’ll try to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about Google storage.

1. what counts towards google storage limit?

with google, users can store up to 15gb of data. While this seems generous, old messages, photos, and other documents stored on Google Drive can quickly exceed this amount. google storage limit includes gmail, google drive and google photos.

2. what happens to gmail if the storage limit is reached?

once your data usage reaches a certain threshold, gmail displays a warning in your inbox. When you have exceeded your storage quota for three months, gmail will display a message saying “you have no space to send or receive email”.

The only thing you can do at this time is view all messages in your account but not send or receive new emails. your account must be reduced below the storage quota to resume normal operation.

3. what happens to your files when you exceed the limit?

In case you exceed the storage limit on google drive for two years, google may delete all your content including your photos, gmail messages and files on google drive. You’ll be notified multiple times if your content is at risk of removal, giving you plenty of time to take action.

4. deleting emails will free up gmail storage

of course yes. but you have to be smart about deleting emails. As we explained above, you should look for large emails with large attachments and bulk delete those unnecessary emails. you can also search for useless subscription emails and bulk delete them to save space.