One of the Gmail accounts in the Aamoth household just started showing the dreaded “Account storage is full” banner, which means it’s time for a good scrubbing.
It’s not surprising: With all the emails, attachments, and documents we accumulate over time, it’s easy for our Gmail accounts to run low on available storage.
Luckily, there are a few easy ways to free up Gmail space in a matter of minutes.
Delete old email
One of the simplest ways to free up space is to regularly go through your inbox and delete emails you no longer need.
And being that old mail is often less important than new mail, here’s a trick to start from the distant past and work your way forward.
Place your cursor in Gmail’s search bar and then click the slider icon on the far-right side. This will open up a menu with a bunch of parameters you can use to search for specific stuff.
But try this: Instead of typing in any search terms, just hit the blue Search button in the lower-right corner. Congrats: you’ve searched for and found every email you’ve got.
Click the email count in the upper-right above the messages list and choose “Oldest” to display all your messages from oldest to newest. Then start making your way through, deleting anything you don’t need anymore.
Unsubscribe from and delete unwanted newsletters and promos
Newsletters, promotional emails, and other subscriptions can quickly fill up your inbox.
One quick way to unsubscribe: enter “Unsubscribe” in the search box. That’ll call up every message with the word “unsubscribe” in it, which is found at the bottom of most newsletters and promotional messages.
You can then go nuclear on large swaths of messages and, even better, take the time to actually unsubscribe from the senders you no longer want to hear from.
Delete messages with large attachments
Emails with large attachments can eat up a lot of storage space. To manage these, place your cursor in the search bar and then click the slider icon on the far-right side.
In the menu that pops up, click the “Has attachment” checkbox and enter “5” in the Size row. This will surface messages with attachments larger than 5 MB.
Those are big attachments, so go through and delete anything you don’t need. You can then repeat the process by entering 4, 3, 2, and 1 to whittle down message sizes.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
A popular “true crime” YouTube channel has been pulling in millions of views with videos about gruesome murders. As it turns out, None of them are real.
One of those videos, titled ̶
As former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Jen Pahlka helped to create the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). Today, the USDS houses Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), hell-ben
A young DARPA-backed startup with a fresh spin on a low-power computer chip has raised over $100 million in a Series B funding round, a sign of the wild appetite for more energy-efficient ways to
The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General on Friday said it was launching an audit of the security controls for the federal government’s payment system, after Democratic se
Bowling Green, Kentucky, is known for being the city from which Corvettes roll off the production lines, and for Fruit of the Loom underwear, which is headquartered there.
But the city o
On January 29, President Donald Trump celebrated the latest victory
The Daytona 500 is one of the more challenging races on the
