My Gmail inbox was taking up 5GB of storage. Here are 4 ways I cleaned it up

When you run out of Google’s 15GB of free cloud storage, the first instinct is usually to go after the photos and files you’ve backed up over time. And while that makes sense, you shouldn’t ignore your emails. Those can sometimes take up just as much space, if not more, especially if you’ve been using Gmail for years. Mine was sitting at 5.27GB, which is slightly over a third of the free storage, and I hadn’t even noticed.

The fix, though, doesn’t have to be paying for Google One. A few minutes of inbox cleanup is usually enough to claw back some serious gigabytes. If you’re in need of some overdue inbox cleaning, here are four tips you’ll want to know.

The thing about email storage is that it’s not the sheer number of emails that weigh you down. You could have 50,000 emails sitting in your inbox and barely use any meaningful amount of storage if they’re mostly text. The real culprits are those emails with attachments. So, if you need to free up a lot of space in a pinch, your best bet is to hunt down those attachments and delete the ones you don’t need.

You don’t have to do this manually, though. Gmail has a built-in cleanup tool for exactly this. Open the Gmail app, tap your profile icon in the top-right, then select Clean up space. Under “Emails with large attachments,” tap Review, and Gmail will pull up every email with a large attachment. From there, check the ones you don’t need and tap Delete. You’ll also find your recent emails on this list, so make sure you don’t delete anything important.

Next, find and delete emails in the Spam and Trash folders from the same menu. Simply select the relevant filter at the top, use the checkboxes, and hit Delete.

Google’s cleanup tool is useful, but it often omits emails with small attachments. In my case, Gmail was hogging 5.27GB of storage, but the cleanup tool only found enough to free up 915MB. And there’s a good chance it’ll miss a fair bit for you too. If you want a thorough cleanup, use Gmail’s search operators to find email with attachments and delete them manually.

In Gmail, type has:attachment into the search bar, and it’ll pull up every single email with a file attached, regardless of size. This might leave you with thousands of emails, but you can narrow things down by typing larger:5MB. You can combine both like this: has:attachment larger:5MB to see all emails larger than 5MB. You can swap out the number here depending on how aggressive you want to be with the cleanup. And if you only want to target older emails, you can add a date filter too. Something like has:attachment larger:5MB before:2024/01/01 will show you only large attachments from before 2024.

This works on both the Gmail app and the website, though I’d lean towards doing it on the website since it’s much easier to scan large batches of emails on a big screen. In any case, emails you delete this way land in Trash, so don’t forget to empty it once you’re done.

Once you’ve wiped away emails with large attachments, it’s time to go after old, unwanted emails — promotional messages, social notifications, update alerts, that sort of thing. Deleting these obviously won’t free up nearly as much space as attachments did, but if you’re after every last megabyte, it’s worth the five minutes of your time.

Head over to the Promotions tab in Gmail, then select everything in there or use older_than:1y category:promotions search filter to only clear out the stuff that’s actually old. This should bring up all the promotional emails that are most likely useless at this point. Select them all and hit Delete to confirm. You can then do the same for social and update categories too by heading to the relevant tab.

Cleaning up your inbox is only half the job. If you stop here, your inbox will be right back where it was in a few months, thanks to all those newsletters and unwanted emails. They may be easy to ignore, but as long as they’re sitting in your inbox, they’re dead weight against your storage. Thankfully, Gmail has a couple of tools that can help you with this.

You can start with the Manage Subscriptions feature. Tap the hamburger icon in the Gmail app and choose Manage Subscriptions. Here, you’ll find a list of senders you’re subscribed to and even the number of emails they’ve sent recently. You’re most likely to spot a few newsletters and mailing lists you don’t even remember signing up for. Simply unsubscribe from anything you don’t don’t want or need.

For senders that don’t show up on this list but still keep emailing you anyway, blocking them is your best move. Open any email from an unwanted sender, tap the three-dot menu, and choose Block. Once you do this, their emails will go straight to Spam, where they’ll be auto-deleted after 30 days.

The above tips should help you free up a decent chunk of storage, but if you’re worried about deleting anything important, it’s best to download your Gmail data first. It’ll barely take a few minutes. All you have to do is head to Google Takeout, select Gmail from the list of services, and export your entire mailbox in MBOX format. This is more of a safety net than anything. If you end up deleting something important during the cleanup, you’ll still have a copy sitting on your PC or hard drive.

Another option is to stop relying on your primary account’s storage altogether. Set up a second Gmail account and enable email forwarding on your main account so new messages are automatically redirected from there. You can even configure Gmail to delete messages once they’re forwarded. This is a workaround, of course. If you can free up space by clearing out Photos or Drive files, or by paying for extra storage, those are still the better options.