Gmail provides you about 7.3 GB of space for storing all your email messages. It covers your messages in all the Gmail folders including the Inbox, Sent, Spam and Trash folders. Generally speaking, this storage limit of 7.3 GB should be sufficient for storing hundreds of thousands of mails. So, it should not create a problem for most of the Gmail users. However, if you’re used to sending or receiving email with attachments of large files such as video files, music files, photos, PDF files, PowerPoint presentation files (PPT), zip or exe files, etc., you can soon cross this storage limit. To put the things in right perspective, for example, if you send and/or receive about 1500 MP3 files as attached files, with an average size of say 4MB to 5MB, you’re likely to cross the above storage limit of 7.3 GB very soon. So, it all depends on your usage. In this article, I’ll describe as to how to keep you Gmail account size well within the storage size limit. These steps will be useful for other email service providers also, such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, etc., with consequential changes.
The amount of space you’re using in your Gmail account and your storage limit can be seen at the bottom of any Gmail page. When you start approaching your storage limit, the quota indicator of your storage usage at the bottom of the Gmail pages will change from green to red. This should act as a signal for you to control your Gmail account size. Moreover, if you cross your storage limit, incoming messages to your Gmail account will get automatically returned to the senders. Therefore, it is essential that you should keep your Gmail account size under control otherwise you run the risk of missing your email messages.
Let me also point out that Gmail also gives an option to upgrade the storage limit of the Gmail account on payment basis. At present the paid storage plans for Gmail are as under:
How to keep Gmail account size within limits?
Okay. Let me now discuss some simple steps that you can take to ensure that your Gmail account size does not exceed the storage limit:
(1) Clear your Trash folder by permanently deleting messages currently found in that folder. Though the messages stored in the Trash folder are automatically deleted after 30 days, you can delete these messages manually too in case you’re about to face the storage limit problem. This will free some space. Also ensure that whatever messages you delete from other folders as a consequence of the following suggestions, you should also delete them permanently from the Trash folder too immediately thereafter.
(2) Delete all the messages in your Spam folder. Since these messages also count towards your storage quota, deleting such messages may help you to that extent.
(3) Check for old messages in your Inbox and Sent folders. The search expression of the type before:2009/10/25 or will search all your Gmail messages of a date prior to the said date. Change the date as per your convenience. If you want to confine this search also a particular folder, say Sent folder, then use the search query of the type before:2009/10/25 in:sent to view the old messages. After viewing these messages, you can delete those messages that are not needed now.
(4) Check for messages in the Sent folder which have attachments. Use search query in:sent has:attachment to find such messages. Probably you may not need to maintain such messages with attachments in your Sent folder after they’ve already been delivered to the recipients.
(5) You can also check messages in Inbox folder having attachments in a manner similar to that explained above. Wherever necessary, you can delete such messages.
(6) In particular, try to search and delete those messages that have large files attached to them. These files may be MP3 files, video files, high resolution photo files, exe files, zip files, PDF files, etc. Unfortunately, Gmail does not have a feature to search automatically depending upon the attachment file size. But, you can search on the file name or the file type. For example, you can search all messages by searching filename:pdf or by searching filename:mp3. Thereafter, check the search results and delete the messages with large file attachments wherever necessary.
(7) Try deleting routine notifications received from social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., wherever those notifications have outlived their utility and are not needed any more.
(8) If you’ve subscribed to several mailing lists or Groups, you must be getting several email newsletters from them. Try to find such mails and delete them wherever possible. If a particular mailing list is sending you mail from the email address abc@xyz.com then you can search all such mails by searching for from:abc@xyz.com and then after viewing the messages in the search result, delete them wherever possible.
(9) Consider whatever other repetitive email messages you keep getting. Or, whatever other messages you consider to be not that important. Delete all such messages.
(10) IMPORTANT: Sign up for a new Gmail account. Import all mails (or certain heavy size mails) from the current Gmail account to your new Gmail account. See my earlier article How to import all emails from one Gmail account to another, for this purpose. After your mails in the existing Gmail account have been transferred (or exported) to the new Gmail account successfully, you can then delete the mails from the existing Gmail account. This will free your existing Gmail account fully and you can keep getting new email in the same Gmail account without any worries. If needed in future, open a third Gmail account and transfer the additional mails to that third Gmail account to free up space in the original Gmail account whose address is known to all your friends, etc.
(11) In fact, in continuation of the previous paragraph, I may suggest that you can use a secondary Gmail account as a regular backup account. This means that after periodic intervals, you can keep shifting your heavy size emails from the main Gmail account to the secondary Gmail account. This will ensure that your original or main Gmail account remains free.
(12) If necessary, you can also open email account with some other service provider such as Yahoo! Mail or Windows Live Hotmail account. And, then keep forwarding certain email messages from your Gmail account to such secondary email account with other service provider, after which you can delete those forwarded messages from the original Gmail account to free up space.
(13) After deleting your mail from other folders, don’t forget to permanently delete all these mails from the Trash folder also by completely emptying it.
(14) In spite of the above steps, if you still face the storage limit problems, consider upgrading your Gmail account by taking extra storage space on payment basis, as mentioned in the beginning of this article. Or else, consider opening another email account and notify your friends, etc., of your new email address.
I hope that these steps will help you in reducing the size of your Gmail account and will keep it within the permissible storage limit so that your account remains active and no incoming mails are returned to the senders.
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