Is Your Gmail Account Almost Full? Here’s a Quick Trick to Free Up Space on Gmail  
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. - 3 Comments, Last updated 08/16/2011

Google provides you with 7 GB of Gmail storage, which sounds like a lot, but if you get a lot of email, or are using Gmail as an archive system, at some point you can still find that your Gmail account is nearly full. So, how to reduce the amount of space being used in your Gmail account?

Here is one quick and easy way to free up space on Gmail - potentially a lot of space. It involves a simple search to find all the emails in your Gmail account that are space hogs: the Gmail messages with attachments.

Gmail allows you to send - and receive - attachments up to 25 megabytes in size per attachment.

More to the point, people include attachments in email all the time - many of which are completely unnecessary, which don’t enhance your (the email recipient’s) email experience at all, and which you often don’t even bother to look at (if you even notice they are there). For example, Vcards, and ‘cute’ graphics in their signature or even full-on “stationery” graphic images.

The way to find all email that has an attachment attached to it in Gmail is to search, in Gmail, for:

has:attachment

Unfortunately, there is no way to augment this search to find attachments by size, or to even sort the above result by size. But if you don’t care about deleting all email that has attachments, deleting them all is one of the fastest ways to reduce your usage, and free up space, in Gmail.

If you do care, you can limit your search to only older email with attachments, by doing this:

has:attachment before:year/month/date

So, for example:

has:attachment before:2011/01/01

..will show you all email that has an attachment that you received before the first of the year 2011.

Another way to go at this is to search for specific file types, as some files types, such as image files like .jpg and .gif, video files like .mov and .3gp (from cell phones), and spread sheet files (xls), are generally much larger than others (such as the .vcf files of Vcards).

The way to search for specific file types is:

filename:extension

So, for example:

filename:jpg

..will find all emails in Gmail that have a JPG image as an attachment.

Again, you can also limit this type of search (and indeed any type of search in Gmail) with the date restriction.

If you just can’t bring yourself to delete anything, you can also buy extra storage capacity from Gmail. Starting at just $5 per year for an extra 20 GB, it’s still quite a bargain. Other amounts of additional storage space that you can buy on Gmail are:

80 GB ($20.00 per year)
200 GB ($50.00 per year)
400 GB ($100.00 per year)
1 TB ($256.00 per year)

You can buy extra Gmail storage space here.