How do I free up space in Gmail?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com.
This is actually a surprisingly common scenario.
All of a sudden you run out of space in your Google account,
and and either you start getting notifications that you're out of space or
worse, people that are trying to send you email
can't. The email bounces back to them telling them that you're out of space.
Here's the question we're looking at.
"How can I export my entire Gmail inbox to Dropbox?
I've run up against the new 15 gigabyte
storage cap and I want to move it to my Dropbox account." 15GB to begin with?
It's not new. That's always been the limit,
as far as I know for free, Google accounts.
15GB Is a lot of space, honestly, and I think that one of the things
that surprises people is that it's not just your email.
Let's have a quick look at my Google account.
My example, Google account here on Windows 11.
So this is, of course, Gmail.
And if we first take a look at the 0GB
of 15GB used, as you can imagine, this is an example account,
so actually almost nothing is stored here, but it'll still work for us.
I'll click on this little icon here, this
arrow coming out of a box. That's going to open up a new window about our storage.
And yes, I've got 15GB of storage because this is a free account.
Now, what's most important to understand
here is that it's about more than just email. Google Drive,
if you use Google Drive, whatever you have stored there counts.
If you use Google Photos,
whatever you have stored there counts, and that surprises people.
It's not the same as in some other
services, I think on the Microsoft side OneDrive and your email and Outlook dot
com are separate storage allocations, whereas in Google, it's all one.
So if we now want to take a look at what
those files might be, we could actually click here to open up
Google Drive and it'll show that there's one file here.
It's the default file that shows you how to get started.
I'll close this. Gmail?
We already know how to get to. Google Photos.
There is this place where you can have
photos that a lot of people don't realize counts against this 15GB.
Where this usually comes up is if people
have an Android or even an iphone, and they've got the mobile app also
installed for Google Photos, which by default, I think you do with most
Android phones, and that then is automatically uploading
your photos as you take them to back them up.
Now, to be clear, that's a really good thing.
Do that.
But it also means that every photo you're uploading not only takes some space here
in Google Photos, but it takes place back in what they call Google One storage.
It all counts against your 15GB.
So the question is,
what do you do about this, you've determined that you're at 15GB
and you have some understanding now of where that 15GB might be.
What do you do about it?
Well, of course, the very first thing that they suggest,
and you can see it's right here at the top of this page is to get more storage.
And in fact, that's what I've done.
I've actually purchased Google Drive storage for my personal account.
It turns out that my use case
it actually makes sense for me to pay for the additional storage.
That's not true for everybody. I get that.
So one of the things, though that you might want to look at is
understanding what the cost is for additional storage.
If you have alternatives, if you might want to just continue to use
this, I will say that aside from throwing money at the problem,
which is really all this is, this is probably the simplest solution.
You're paying money to make the problem go
away and it just goes away once you're done.
The next thing to do,
as I've kind of alluded to already is to check those other services.
In other words, spend some time in Google Drive if you're
using it, spend some time in Google Photos if you're using it.
If you find that you have files there
and decide if those are things you need to keep.
If those are things you need to keep
online, if they're not download them to your PC, put them somewhere on your PC
so that they get stored and hopefully backed up separately and appropriately.
But they are then removed from your Google
account and therefore free up space for your email or whatever else.
Option number three.
Well, clean up your email.
And by that I mean,
spend some time in Gmail going through, ideally in your All Mail folder,
which actually does show you all of the mail except for spam and trash.
And that then, is an opportunity for you to say, okay, do I need to keep this?
Do I need to keep this message?
Do I need to keep all of this stuff?
Like, in my case, here you can see I've got a Google security alert.
I've got a couple of them.
I have some other notifications from Google.
My habit is to just hit the archive
button, which doesn't make the mail go away.
It just keeps it in the all mail folder without showing up in my inbox.
I save everything. I'm a pack rat.
But if that's working against you,
then perhaps one of the things you want to do is identify those messages or those
classes of messages that you no longer need to keep and delete them.
Another kind of targeted approach is to take a look at which of your messages
have attachments and pay attention to the size of those attachments.
Attachments, by and large,
are the reason that email takes up as much space as it does.
You may have thousands of messages,
and they may all take up as much space as one really large attachment.
So one of the things to do is to take
a look at the email messages you have in your all mail that have attachments.
Now, I don't think I have any here, but one of the simplest things you can do
is do this search for Has attachment, and you can see I do have one message
here, and it does have an attachment as identified by the paper clip.
If you now take a look at that message,
you can see that there's an attachment and you could decide whether or not
that is something that you want to keep or if you just want to remove the attachment.
Again, these are different ways to analyze
the mail that's in your inbox that's in your mail folder.
It's in your all mail that basically
allows you to decide what's worth keeping and what's not.
And by deleting what's not, you're freeing up the space for other things.
Now, the other option and the option that I actually prefer for almost all
of these cases is to use a desktop email program to download your email.
Now, it's simple in concept,
but it is somewhat more complex to actually implement step by step.
What you end up doing is you end up
installing an email program like, say, Thunderbird or Microsoft Office Outlook or
any of a number of other desktop email programs that work for you.
Configure that to access your Gmail account using IMAP.
What that will do is after some amount of time, your desktop email program will
have a copy of everything that's in your email.
It'll have all 15GB of email if that's what you have.
So it might take a little while depending
on your Internet speed for all that stuff to be downloaded.
But the point is, it will be downloaded.
Then create a folder in that email program that is a local folder.
I can't give you directions because it
depends on the specific email program you're using.
But what it boils down to is you create
a local folder that is outside of your configured Gmail account.
It's separate it's kept only locally.
Then move email from the folders
that represent your Gmail to this local folder.
That way, you're keeping the messages.
They're still in this local folder on your PC, but you're moving them out of your
Gmail folder, your Gmail account, freeing up the space for Gmail.
That is probably the most complete solution.
And I say that because there's no deleting involved.
You're not deleting any messages,
you're not deleting any files, you're not deleting any anything.
You're simply moving where these things are stored and by taking them out of your
Gmail account and keeping them only on your PC, you're then freeing up
that space for Google in the rest of your account.
Now, a side effect of this, of course,
is that you should be backing up your PC anyway, right?
This technique of setting up Thunderbird or some other desktop email program
to periodically access your online email account using IMAP is exactly how I
recommend you be backing up your email to begin with.
If your email exists only online only in Gmail, then it's not backed up.
By doing this, you get a copy on your PC.
Then if you've got that in place to be
backing up your email account, then just adding this step of creating
some local folders and moving messages from your Gmail account to your local
folders allows you to then more easily free up the space that is in Gmail.
Finally, I do need to talk about Dropbox
the original questions that I want to move my email to Dropbox.
No, you don't.
Here's the thing.
I've done this.
I use Thunderbird as my email backup.
In fact, I have it running on the very PC that I'm recording this video on right now
and it's periodically downloading my email to some local folders on my machine.
I did have the Thunderbird profile configured to actually store all of this
in Dropbox, which was kind of cool because that way the files would get replicated
to all my other machines and backed up to the cloud again.
Unfortunately,
when you try to access those Thunderbird folders from another machine using
Thunderbird, Thunderbird gets really confused.
It can get really confused. Certainly it did.
For me.
There were just random oddities that in the long run I didn't want to deal with.
I was afraid of having those oddities
causing me to lose email, and I don't want to do that.
So while it seems interesting in practice, it's really too fragile.
You really don't necessarily want to have your email.
Certainly not your live Thunderbird
profile stored in Dropbox, and I believe that's going to be true
for just about any other email program you use.
Now, I will say it's a fine approach to archive your email.
Maybe you keep local folders there.
Maybe you do keep your live folders there, but you absolutely positively access them
from one and only one copy of Thunderbird on one and only one machine.
In theory, that should be okay.
But if you're going to do that to begin
with, your mail is already in the cloud.
It's in whatever account you're using
and accessing via IMAP, but the other is you're backing up your PC anyway, right?
So if it happens to be in some other folder that isn't in Dropbox,
your regular backups are going to be backing it up anyway.
So using Dropbox for this,
you don't really want the replication because you're not going to access it
using other copies of your mail program because that's too fragile.
That kind of defeats the purpose of Dropbox in this case.
Then if you're going to be backing up your machine anyway, why not keep it outside
of Dropbox keep it separate so that it's backed up separately.
It's used locally and it just works more reliably.
That's the approach that I'm taking these days quite literally.
I have Thunderbird as I said, installed here.
It's downloading email.
I have local folders.
I only have, like the last two years worth of email stored in my Gmail account,
but I have local folders that are on my PC only for all of the email that precedes
that and once a year I go through and clean things up those then get backed
up regularly every night in my case, so that's my recommendation for you is
to not bother with Dropbox, but instead use a desktop email program
to download your email and then move some of your email to local folders so
that they're not counting against your Gmail quota anymore.
I hope that was helpful.
I hope that gives you some ideas on directions to head off in.
You don't have to do the last thing,
but there are some other things that you can be doing for related links for updates
for more ideas from some of our readers and comments, visit
askleo.com/138968
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
askleo.com