Facing a Gmail storage crisis is one of the most raised issues by people who rely on cloud storage. Most of the free cloud storage services offer a limited space to store your files including Google. Gmail comes with 15 GB of memory. It may appear enough but considering our dependence on the internet, you are likely to feel the need for more space soon. If you are not willing to spend money on buying more storage for Gmail, the following tips shall help you to free up space immediately.
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1) Clean your Google Drive and Photos
Google offers 15GB of storage for free to all Gmail users. This storage is distributed among different Google services, especially Google Drive and Photos. For instance, if you have upload 10GB of photos on Drive and Photos, the space left for your Gmail will only be 5GB. The easiest way to provide more space to Gmail is by freeing up space used by Drive and Photos. If there are large files in your Photos and Google Drive, delete them if you can. That will free up space for emails. You may check your Google storage summary by going to https://www.google.com/settings/storage.
2) Find and delete big emails
A majority of the emails you get are small in size, say, 50 KB or less. however, some of them may be several MB in size. It happens due to the big-sized attachments in the form of data files, high-resolution images, and videos. If you are sure that the purpose of the attachments is fulfilled and you will not require them in the future, you can free up a significant amount of space in Gmail. To find the mails with heavy attachments, you just need to go to the search bar and type “larger:50m”. If you need more space, you can even search for “larger:25m” or even “larger:20m”.
3) Find and delete “ancient” emails
The mails in your inbox gradually lose significance with time. You don’t need to keep emails that are, say, four years old. Similarly, there is no point storing casual conversations on Gmail with your friends during your school or college days. Deleting such mails will reclaim much of your Gmail storage. It will also clean up the account that had accumulated emails that are no more relevant. To find all your old emails, you just need to type on the search bar “older_than:1y”. You can set the year based on your preference. Once you have the list of the old emails, you can delete them in just a couple of clicks.
4) Get rid of the updates, promotional emails, and spam
Gmail keeps your emails organised in the form of categories as ‘Primary’, ‘Social’, and ‘Promotions’. Among these three tabs, the ‘Primary’ category is where your important emails are kept. The other tabs contain notifications about your social media accounts, profiles, promotional offers, and advertisements. Since you get such emails frequently, you accumulate a lot of them over some time. Similarly, your spam folder contains a lot of emails sent from websites that you’ve blocked. When running low on space, you can freely get rid of them.
5) Plain Text and Quotes
Although emails containing nothing, but HTML text require lesser than those with attached files. However, over a long period, they add up to a significant size. If you don’t take care of them, they can cause a space crisis. You can save a lot of space by assigning your emails to plain text or changing the default setting to quote every email you reply to.
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