When Gmail was launched in 2004, its most striking feature was the huge storage space that the platform offered its users compared to competing services. But today, and especially for long-time users, 15GB of space can start to be fair.
Of course, Google offers a paid subscription to get more space, but in most cases, you don't need to take the plunge. Deleting a few old, large emails can be a great way to get some space back in your inbox!
The solution: do an advanced search on your mailbox!
Free up space on Gmail by filtering large emails
One of the big advantages of Gmail is that, like most Google services, it offers particularly powerful search tools. You will therefore be able to easily find what you are looking for.
So if you type size: followed by a numeric value representing a size in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes in the search box, you will retrieve a list of your emails whose size is equal to or greater than this numeric value.
For example, if you type size: 5m ou size:5000k ou size: 5000000, you will get all your emails that are 5MB or more.
In addition to the keyword "size:", you can use search operators like bigger, larger_than, smaller et smaller_than to find files larger or smaller than a certain size. A combination of these search operators is also possible. For example, the following Gmail search query will find all emails with attachment sizes between 9 and 12 MB:
larger:9m smaller:12m
Finally, if you click on the small arrow to the right of the search area, you will see an even more comprehensive search form appear which will allow you to search by recipient, sender, size, date, keywords, etc.
But back to the point, once you have filtered messages over a certain size, you can delete those that you do not consider important or necessary or select them all and add a label to them that will allow you to sort them out on occasion.
Once you're done cleaning up, don't forget to empty your Gmail trash to free up space!
Article updated on January 24, 2021 by Byothe
