Quickly Clean Out Your Berkeley Email and Reduce Your Google Storage

Opportunity

Reducing your email will reduce your overall Berkeley Google storage usage. If you have lots of  emails and/or attachments this will have a significant impact. 

This guide provides several ways to reduce your email storage:

Overview - Before you begin

Before you reduce your email, it is important to understand that:

• Archiving email is not deleting it.

• Email in Berkeley Google email exists in five places, regardless of whether or not Labels have been added:

  • Inbox

  • Sent

  • Archive

  • Spam

  • Trash

• Emails in the Trash and Spam folders also count against your storage. While these emails should automatically delete 30 days after they were put in these folders, it is best to free up space regularly by manually emptying them.

  • We recommend emptying your Trash frequently because Google’s deletion process may stall if you are deleting too much at one time.  

• After deleting email, it may take time for the changes to be reflected in your Google storage usage stats.

• Whether you have Conversation View turned on or off will affect whether you are deleting one email in a thread or the entire thread when you are deleting an email.

• There are many ways to search or filter your email using Advanced Search with these Search Operators.

Delete emails in bulk

Google allows you to delete your emails individually or in bulk from anywhere in Berkeley Google mail (i.e. labels, search results, etc.). 

1. Search or filter for emails you want to delete.

2. Select the checkbox just above the search results; this will select all of the email on the page. Depending on your mail settings, this may be 50 or 100 or however many you display per page.

3. In order to select all of the results and not just the ones on the page, you will need to click the link that is now showing above your email that says, “Select all conversations that match this search.” Note that the link may or may not mention the number of conversations that will be deleted. 

4. Click the mail Trash can icon to delete this selection.

   1. You may be asked to “Confirm Bulk Action.”

   2. We recommend you manually empty the Trash rather than waiting for Google to empty it in 30 days.

In the search results view, select the emails you want to delete and then click the trash can icon to move them to the Trash.

Note: If you have selected thousands of emails to delete all at once, it could take a while to process. It’s possible that only a portion of the emails you selected will be deleted and you may have to repeat the process until all of the search results are deleted. 

Tip: If you use a screen reader, the University of Illinois has developed a Chrome/Firefox bookmarklet to assist with the bulk deletion of mail in Gmail.

Delete large attachments

1. Find emails with large attachments by searching for “has:attachment larger:10MB” (without the quotations) in the mail search field at the top of the page and press Enter.

   1. This will identify emails with attachments larger than 10 MB. If this returns too many emails, you can start higher by replacing "10" with a higher number, such as 15 or 20, to find even larger files. 

Search results for has:attachment larger:10

2. You can also use Advanced Search instead. Note: be sure to check “Has attachment”

Advanced Search View for "has:attachment larger:10MB”

2. From within the search results, select specific emails and delete them individually or select all search results and delete them in bulk.

   1. If the email is part of a thread, you can delete just the single message with the large attachments while retaining the other emails in the thread or you can select all of the emails in the thread and delete them.

Note: You cannot delete an attachment without deleting the email it is attached to.

What happens when you delete an email with an attachment? 

Delete emails by date

1. Enter “before:YYYY-MM-DD” (replace the placeholders with a date and do not include the quotations) in the Gmail search field at the top of the page and press Enter. You can also use Advanced Search as shown above.

2. This will identify emails older than the date you enter. 

3. Select specific emails and delete them individually or delete all search results in bulk as described above.

Delete Sent emails

1. Email you have sent may or may not display in your search results. Generally when you use the Search field you will be searching ALL MAIL by default, which includes your Sent email. However, you should consider checking your Sent folder for email you can delete. 

2. Consider searching within the Sent folder.

   1. Click on the Sent folder from the sidebar and then include any other search criteria to narrow your results and then delete as already described.

Delete emails from Spam

Emails in your Spam folder count against your storage limit, so it is good practice to delete these regularly. It may take time for the changes to be reflected in your Berkeley Google storage usage stats. (Note that Spam storage is not reported per se but is part of the mail count.)

Tip: We recommend checking your Spam folder periodically for legitimate emails that may appear there by mistake. (If you do find a message that has been accidentally marked as spam, you can select it and click “Not spam” in the top toolbar or at the top of the message to help ensure that future messages from this sender are not flagged as spam.)

To delete emails from Spam:

1. Click Spam from the left sidebar in Gmail. (You may need to click “More” to find the Spam folder.)

Click More to find the Spam folder if it is not visible.

2. Click “Delete all spam messages now.”

3. You can also select specific emails and click “Delete forever.”

Choose Delete forever or Delete all spam messages now

Delete emails from Trash

Tip: Deleted email will stay in your Trash for up to 30 days and possibly longer. You will need to empty your Trash in order to free up Google storage space. It may take time for the changes to be reflected in your Google storage usage stats. 

To empty your Trash:

1. Click Trash from the left sidebar in Gmail. (You may need to click “More” to find the Trash folder.)

2. Click “Empty Trash now” at the top to delete all emails in Trash. You can also select specific emails and click “Delete forever.”

3. Click OK to confirm your deletion.

Choose Delete forever or Empty Trash now

Note: You may need to empty your Trash several times if there are a lot of emails to delete. You may need to continue to click “Empty Trash now” until no emails remain. Because of this, we recommend deleting content in your Trash incrementally as you move it to the Trash because Google’s deletion process may stall if you are deleting too much at one time.

Moving forward

If you are in the habit of archiving your emails instead of deleting them, you may want to start deleting them instead. Consider archiving email you need to save, along with applying at least one Label and deleting the rest. That way your email stays organized with Gmail Labels which you can use to easily retrieve important emails.