Gmail: More space in the mailbox very quickly

Thomas Joos

The space in the Gmail inbox is quickly running out. You have 15 GB of storage space in your Google account, but this applies to Google mail, Drive and Photos combined. Since June 1, 2021, photos have also been at the expense of storage space. Android devices are particularly affected by this, as the photos on these mobile devices are in most cases automatically synchronized with the Google Cloud. But users can also set this accordingly on iPhones. Read our guide: How to download all images and videos from Google Photos.

Since summer 2021: New storage guidelines affect all users

If you don’t clean up your mailbox in a timely manner, there is a risk that Google will partially delete the content of your data. In this case you have no means of intervening and you will lose data. Although Google first writes numerous e-mails before a deletion, asking you to buy additional storage space and only wants to delete data after 2 years, the situation is not satisfactory for any user in the long term. 100 GB of storage space costs 2 euros / month on Google. If you want to use 200 GB of storage space, you have to pay 3 euros / month. For 10 euros / month you get 2 TB of storage. In this case, you no longer need to delete any data.

But rescue is near: We give tips so that you have enough space in Gmail again.

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Turn off automatic photo upload on Android devices

Google is currently (still) excluding data that has already been saved. But that can also change quickly. If you use a Pixel smartphone, you are also not (yet) affected by this change. You can currently upload unlimited photos to the cloud here. Other Android devices no longer benefit from these possibilities. Here it can be useful to prevent the automatic upload of photos to Google Photos in the Google Photos settings on the Android device. To do this, click the icon for managing the profile in the Photos app. Here you can see the status of the backup. Tap it with your finger and use the three dots in the top right to call up the settings for the backup. At this point, you can turn off photo uploading in the future.

Changing the storage policy can cause problems, forcing you to delete data or buy additional storage space. Of course, it makes much more sense here if you delete data yourself that you no longer need, for example old e-mails with large attachments or other unnecessary files.

Delete unnecessary emails

Clean up your Gmail inbox and make sure that no junk data is wasting space.

Cleaning up the Gmail inbox is not a complicated matter. You can perform the actions using the web browser. There are also options for deleting emails directly in the mail apps and also in Android, but using the web interface is the best and easiest way to clean up the mailbox.

Before deleting e-mails, you can quickly find out in the Gmail interface how much storage space is available to you and what amount of data you have already saved. You will find a bar for this in the lower area of ​​the web interface.

Click on the link below the bar and a new website will open that provides a detailed breakdown of how the data is distributed. Here you can see the amount of data you are storing in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. To do this, you need to have a Google One subscription.

The easiest way to manage your storage and e-mail is via the “Free up account space” link on the Google One website. Here you will see a list of different areas in which you can free up space, including files in the Recycle Bin , Spam e-mails, but also deleted files in Google Drive, for example files from Gmail that are no longer needed.

In the lower area you will also find a list of very large elements that take up a lot of storage space. Here you can also see emails with large file attachments, but also large files in Google Drive and Google Photos.

Delete directly in the Gmail interface

Deleting files that are no longer necessary is also very easy in the Gmail interface. In the upper area you will find the tabs “General”, “Social Networks” and “Advertising”. If you click on the tabs, Gmail will display the emails from this area, and you can delete advertising and emails from social networks directly.

If you delete a lot of emails at once, you still have to confirm this. The deleted emails can then be found in the trash. If you also empty this, the mails are completely deleted. Google will delete the trash automatically after 30 days anyway.

You can also filter the inbox to delete e-mails from your inbox that you can’t see at first glance whether you still need them or not. Google provides a list of all filter options on its website.

In the upper area you can enter the filters in the search field and thereby find, check and, if necessary, delete the desired e-mails. Examples are:

You can use “size:” or “larger:” to find messages that are larger than a certain size in bytes. Here you can use “larger: 100” for a message larger than 100 bytes, or “larger: 15M” for a message larger than 15 megabytes.