Gmail offers 15 GB of free storage space, and although a few years ago it seemed like a lot, nowadays it is not so much anymore and if it is used intensively, it ends up full and presents messages like this: ‘You can’t send or receive emails because you don’t you have storage space. Try to clear some space or buy more space’. In any case, and to solve this, we have some tricks and solutions to free up and have more space in our email.
Storage space in Gmail is not infinite
The storage of documents, photos and videos in the ‘cloud’ has become essential. However, many times we run out of free space and have to stop updating files at the risk of losing all the information. With this, the Gmail email has become the main one to collect all our tasks, but it does not have an infinite space .
Specifically, we only have 15 GB of free storage in your Google account, and you have to share it with Google Photos and Google Drive as well. For this reason, and if we do not want or are not willing to buy more space as Google offers for this service, we have some very complete tricks.
However, once we have reached that limit, Gmail notifies us . If you don’t free up space, what happens is that we will stop receiving emails. And you can’t send them either. Users who try to contact you will receive a message that your account has no available space.
What can we do
Those factors are what lead us to mailboxes full of thousands of messages, and yes, we know: most of them unopened. We let the years go by, we live with the digital Diogenes syndrome, until the surprise arrives. Incredible but true, Gmail warns us that we have exceeded our quota and we have to delete messages.
And it is that emails also take up a lot of space , especially those with attachments. So if you’ve also seen storage full in Gmail, here are some easy ways to free up space in Gmail for free, or without buying Google ‘cloud’ storage.
Avoid collapse
To prevent reaching this point, you have to enter Gmail and look in the lower left corner, where there will be a message with the space that is available. There you must click on ‘Manage’, where you can see how much space you have occupied.
Everything, in addition to the status of other Google services associated with the account such as Google Drive and Google Photos. In your case, the 15GB mentioned is for all three platforms, not just mail. To do so and avoid a possible crash, just type “has:attachment larger:10M” in the top search box.
It is important that between ‘has’ and ‘attachment’ (and between ‘larger’ and 010M’) there are colons and no spaces. The space must be between ‘attachment’ and ‘larger’. The next step is to empty the trash by clicking on ‘More’, ‘Trash’ and ‘Empty Trash Now’. Later we will also empty the Spam folder.
Get rid of attachments
Another of the great causes for which your Gmail account is saturated can be the heavy attachments . To free that space from your Gmail account and get more space, it is the way to get rid and delete these types of emails and messages.
From the Gmail search field, clicking on it will display the advanced search options. We are only interested in the option ‘Contains attachments’, which we will mark. Then click on ‘Search’. Thanks to that filter, we will only see emails with attachments. This will make it easier and faster for you to find large emails and you will be able to free up space in a matter of minutes.
Empty the bin
Another trick that we can use to free up space in Gmail is to empty the trash, that section in which the emails that you have deleted from the inbox are stored for 30 days . What it does is automatically delete emails that are older than 30 days, but it’s good to delete them directly so they don’t take up space, since you already know you don’t need them.
To empty the Gmail message bin, just follow these steps, either in the desktop version or in the installed application itself.
- Open Gmail.
- Slide the left side menu and enter the “Trash” section.
- Click on the ‘Empty Trash Now’ option and confirm the procedure by clicking on ‘Empty’
Eliminate spam
Another similar and simple way is to delete the messages from the spam folder. Google automatically catalogs received emails in different trays : Main, Social, Promotions, Notifications and Forums. In addition to deleting the emails from these trays, it may be that you miss the spam folder, which is a little more hidden.
To delete these messages you will have to click on ‘More’ and ‘Delete all spam messages now’. You can also select and delete them manually.
Sort your Google Drive and Photos files
We said that Gmail shares the available storage space with Google Drive and Google Photos. In other words, the free 15 GB must be shared with your Drive files and Documents or with your Google Photos photos and videos.
Thus, what we can also do is make an extra effort by also deleting the files that you no longer need from other Google services such as Photos or Google Drive. This will impact the overall storage of your Google account and therefore Gmail.
