Little tip to recover space in your Gmail box

If you've been using your Gmail account for a while or are using up your Google Drive storage, the 15GB of free space is definitely not enough. Before you decide to upgrade to a paid version of these services to get more space, Here's a little tip to help you free up some space in your mailbox..

You won't be surprised if I tell you that thesearch tool in gmail is pretty robust (obviously, it's Google). You can search by date, recipient, keywords... and especially in the case of this tip, by file size!

There are several operators you can use when searching for emails by size:

• Search for a specific size: If you want to find all emails that weigh 3 MB, you will need to type Size:3m
• Search for emails exceeding a certain size: to find all emails larger than 2 MB you will need to perform the following search: Width:2m
• Conversely, to search for emails below a certain size, we will use Smaller:3m
• Finally, if you want to search for all emails with an attachment larger than 10 MB use has attachment size:10m

You can of course adjust the size by changing the number in the search operators above.

Once you have carried out your search on this or that criterion, you can decide what you are going to do with these cumbersome emails: delete them, archive them on your computer or online, etc.

Finally, if you want to reclaim space on your Google Drive, things are a little more complicated. There is no way to sort or search by size, but you can use the following URL (drive.google.com/#quota) which will allow you to see all your files sorted by size, from largest to smallest.

What tips or tricks do you use to keep your Gmail and Google Drive storage manageable? Let us know in the comments.

Article updated on January 6, 2025 by Byothe