How to Free up Space on Gmail

Google offers limited space only on its cloud storage. Therefore, we must ensure judicial use of whatever we get if we don’t want to pay additional fees. People who work in a professional environment often receive heavy email threads that take up a lot of space on the drive. Additionally, we receive files in our spam folder that may have a heavy profile.

Hence, it is crucial to clean up the space once in a while. When the storage is full, new files are not received properly. This affects the business operations. It is important for every professional user to learn cloud space management for better sustainability. If you are fairly new to the Google ecosystem, here is an article about teaching you how to free up space on Gmail.

Deleting files by size

As discussed earlier, the large files in your inbox are one of the primary reasons for space shortage. Therefore, it is important to identify those files and move them to the trash. Here are the steps to delete large files from your Gmail:

• Get on a computer system, and open your Gmail account.
• Go through your inbox and put the large files in the trash. Next, access trash from the menu on the left and delete the files permanently from there.
• If your inbox is cluttered, you may have to filter the files by size. To do this, type has: attachment larger:10M in the search box. This will enable you to access files that are larger
• than 10 MB. You may enter the file size according to your needs and requirements.
• Open the emails that are not of any use to you. Click on the delete icon at the top of the email window and move the file to the trash.
• Now, from the menu, access the trash folder and click on the “empty the trash now” button at the top-right corner.

Deleting files from the spam folder

We provide our email addresses to a lot of websites that end up spamming us with their offers and advertisements. While Google’s algorithm already moves redundant folders to spam, it is crucial to understand that those emails still take up your cloud storage and need to be dealt with. Here is how you can delete files from the spam folder:

• On the left-hand of your Gmail window, access the menu.
• In the menu, look for the Spam folder.
• If you can’t find the spam in the menu, click on the arrow at the bottom to expand the menu.
• Once you access the spam folder, click on the “Delete All Spam Messages Now” button at the top.
• If you are skeptical about accidentally deleting an important email, you can select the files manually and click on the “Delete Forever” button at the top.

Deleting photos and videos

Phone cameras have evolved significantly in the past few years. The pixels are refined, PPI is exemplary, and the details are mindblowing. However, this is a double-edged sword. Better photos mean more storage space requirements. Photos taken from flagship phones today are quite heavy. Moreover, if you are an Android phone user, your media automatically gets backed up on the drive. Therefore, it is important to filter out the files you don’t want to create space for more important things. Here is how you can delete photos and videos from Google Drive:

• Access the address bar in your browser window.
• In the address bar, type photos.google.com.
• This will lead you to your stored media on the Drive.
• Browse the items you want to remove and click on the Select button at the top.
• Once you select the items, you can click on the Delete button at the top-right and select the move to trash option.

Deleting hidden app data

We download a plethora of apps for assistance in our system. On the face of it, the app shows a certain amount of space it will take on the device. However, these apps do not reveal the latent space they will be taking up on the device and on the cloud. This leads to unprecedented filling of cloud space on Gmail. Therefore, it is important to take care of the hidden app data once in a while. Here is how you can delete hidden app data on Gmail:

• Access a computer system, and open a browser.
• In the address bar of the concerned browser, type drive.google.com.
• This will lead you to your Google Drive home page.
• On the home page, locate the Settings button in the Menu.
• Once you go to the Settings, you will find the “Manage Apps” option on the left side, click on it.
• If any of the apps are using hidden data for operations, you will find all the necessary details under the app name.
• To delete this hidden data, click on the “Options” button and then click on Delete Hidden Apps.

Tip: The files you move to the trash stay there for thirty days. So, you have a window to restore the files if the need arises.

Conclusion

We have tried to cover every possible way in this article to clear up space in your Gmail. If you are still facing storage issues, you may have to upgrade your plan to get more storage space on your Drive.

However, if you are just a regular user, the steps given above should do the trick. Remember, if you are in a rush, just move the files to the Trash, where they will stay for 30 days and get deleted automatically thereafter.