Gmail users can free up storage by deleting large emails, clearing Promotions and Social tabs, emptying Spam and Trash, unsubscribing from newsletters, and removing large Drive and Photos files to regain space.
Gmail Storage Cleaning: Google gives you only 15GB of free storage, and this space is shared by your Gmail, Google Drive, and Photos. If you’re not careful, your inbox can get full, and you’ll stop receiving new emails. Before you decide to pay for more storage, try these seven simple tricks to clear up some space.
Gmail Storage
1. First, delete all the large emails. Just type size:10MB in the search bar. This will show you all emails larger than 10MB. Go through the list and delete old videos, PDFs, or presentations that you no longer need.
2. Next, clean up your Promotions and Social tabs. These two tabs are responsible for wasting almost 90% of your storage. Search for category:promotions and category:social and delete these emails in bulk.
3. Don’t forget to empty your Spam and Trash folders. When you delete an email, it stays in the Trash for 30 days. To permanently delete them, search for in:trash and click “Empty trash now”. Do the same for the in:spam folder.
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4. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t read. Every promotional email has an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom. Clicking it will stop future emails and save you space in the long run.
5. Check your Google Photos backup. Since 2021, even “High Quality” photo backups count towards your 15GB limit. Go through your Photos and delete any old, duplicate, or blurry pictures and videos.
6. Find and delete large files from your Google Drive. Visit http://drive.google.com/storage to see a list of your biggest files. You can delete old videos or shared files you don’t need anymore.
7. Keep emails but get rid of heavy attachments. Search for has:attachment. You can download the important attachments to your computer and then delete the original email to save a lot of space.
A quick tip: After deleting emails, they sit in the Trash for 30 days. So, make sure you empty the Trash folder to actually free up the space.
Following these steps can easily free up 2-3GB of storage. Your new emails will start arriving again without any trouble.
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