Clean Out Your Gmail to Reduce Your Google Storage

Audience

• Individuals who are at their storage limit, or need to reduce their Google account storage.

Understanding Gmail Storage

Before you start, it is important to note a few key details about your Gmail account storage and deletion. 

1. Emails in your Drafts and Sent folders count toward your storage limit. 
2. Archived messages count toward your storage limit. Archiving only removes a message from view, it does not delete it or free up any storage space.
3. If Conversation View is enabled, deleting a conversation moves all messages in that conversation to Trash. To delete only a specific message, open the conversation and delete the individual message.
4. Delete emails in batches. Google’s deletion process may stall if you are deleting too much at one time.
5. After deleting email, it takes several days for your Google storage usage stats to reflect the changes.

1. Search For Email

You can easily search for and filter emails that are consuming the most storage space, or aren’t relevant anymore. 

1. Find emails with large attachments by entering “has:attachment larger:10MB” into the search bar. 
2. Find old emails by entering “before:YYYY-MM-DD” with your desired date into the search bar.
3. Target specific folders by clicking on that folder, then entering additional search criteria into the search bar.
4. Note: Make sure you sort your results by “most recent” to get a complete list of results. If your search results default to “most relevant” you might not be viewing all your results.
5. Read more about refining searches in Gmail to find a list of search operators to use.

2. Select & Delete Your Results

Once your search is complete, you can select all matching emails for deletion.

1. After your search has run, click the checkbox to Select All emails. 
   • If you have more than 50 results and you don’t need to review before deletion, you can also Select all conversations that match this search to ensure every email meeting your criteria is included.
2. Deselect any emails you want to exclude from deletion. 
3. Click the Trash icon to delete.

3. Empty Your Trash

Your storage usage will not decrease until the emails are permanently removed from your account. Google automatically deletes email after 30 days.

1. Go to your Trash folder, and click Empty Trash now. 
   • You may need to click this several times until no emails remain.
2. Go to your Spam folder and click Delete all Spam messages now. 
3. It may take several days for your Google storage usage stats to reflect the changes.