5 Minute HelpDesk – How to Free Up Space in Gmail?

Gmail is a popular application for email communication for both official and personal purposes. As more and more businesses shift to work from home options, Gmail is becoming a useful tool for sharing files and staying connected. Gmail can become slow or non-functional due to a filled inbox – if you use Gmail extensively, this could significantly affect your work productivity. This is a very common issue we get at our IT helpdesk team in Perth – let’s hear from them some simple ways to resolve the space issue in your Gmail accounts.

Ways to Free Up Space in Gmail

Getting a bunch of emails every day can make your Gmail inbox full. Google provides users with a total of 15GB of storage for free. But, it is shared among Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Sheets, making it essential to clean up the clutter.

Here are some quick and easy tips to free up space in your Gmail account.

Do a Clean Up

As each mail and its attachment consume space, consider clearing those unnecessary emails. The first step is to clear the Social, Promotions, and Spam tab. Do this regularly to avoid clutter.

Another option is to copy the email address from which you receive promotional emails, search this address in the search bar and delete all of them at once.

You can also delete files by size. Gmail will not show how much storage space each email thread uses but allows searching for threads by size. Just type the size in the search bar and press Enter. Files available of the requested size will appear, and you can delete them and free up the space used by them.

Delete Files with Larger Attachments

The Gmail search box allows searching for specific file types, such as mp3 or doc to locate larger attachments. Find emails that have attachments by opening the search drop-down and choosing the “Has attachment” box. The size limit of a Gmail attachment file is 25MB, so you can free up a larger chunk of space with this method.

Clear Up Drive Files

Google Drive is an excellent source of file storage. Uploading huge files and documents in Drive or storing up backup photos can also consume the Gmail storage space. Make sure to remove all files that you no longer use.

Save and Delete

If you do not want to lose your older or larger Gmail messages, you can convert them to PDF. You could delete the original email after saving or printing the PDF version.

If the attachments are important to you, then you can download them and store them somewhere before deleting the email. As printing is not an environmental-friendly option, consider cloud storage. Our skilled Managed IT team can help you set up cloud computing options to store those important documents in your Gmail.

Set Your Emails to Plain text

A single HTML email with enclosed image and formatted content won’t make much difference. Still, a considerable number of these messages over time can lead to unwanted usage of space. Instead, use plain text; they don’t have the option to enclose an image inside the message or format text. For the same reason, they are easy to load and don’t occupy as much space as HTML emails. Once you set your preference to plain text, Gmail will remember it.

Remove Irrelevant Quoted Text

Another clever means to save storage space is by removing the default quotes that are included in every email reply. You can either remove the entire quoted text or keep only the relevant part while responding. This will prevent the clutter of the same messages repeatedly appearing in a long thread of emails.

Need help with clearing up your Gmail account? Contact us or email us at  helpdesk@computingaustralia.group. Our IT helpdesk team from Perth can support you in fixing any space storage issues, and they can assist with all your IT-related concerns.

Jargon Buster

HTML email – A subset of HTML is utilised to provide emails with formatting and semantic markup capabilities that are not feasible with plain text.
Plain text – Regular text with no formatting capabilities such as bold, italics, underlines, or unique layout options.