How to Clear Gmail Storage: A Complete Guide to Freeing Up Space (2025)

Is your Gmail account warning you that you’re running low on storage? Over time, Gmail storage can fill up with years of emails, attachments, photos, and files. Every Google account comes with 15 GB of free storage that’s shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos (An update to storage policies across your Google Account). That may sound like a lot, but with heavy email usage and automatic backups (like phone photos or WhatsApp chats), it’s easy to hit the limit. When you reach that 15 GB cap, you won’t be able to send or receive new emails until you free up space – which can be a real problem if you rely on Gmail for important communications.

In this guide, we’ll explain why Gmail storage fills up and exactly how to check your storage usage. We’ll then walk through effective methods to free up space: deleting large emails and attachments, emptying Spam and Trash, unsubscribing from cluttering newsletters, bulk-deleting old emails, and even cleaning up Google Drive and Photos since they share the storage pool. We’ll also discuss an alternative approach: archiving emails outside of Gmail so you can save space without permanently deleting important messages. Finally, we’ll introduce Backup Space, a free email archiving solution (up to 50GB free) that lets you back up Gmail messages before deletion – a great way to safeguard your data while cleaning up your account.

By the end of this comprehensive 2025 guide, you’ll know how to clear your Gmail storage step-by-step and prevent that dreaded “storage full” message. Let’s dive in!

How to Check Gmail Storage Usage

Before deleting anything, it’s important to check how much storage you’re using and what’s consuming it. Google makes it easy to see your overall storage status and breakdown.

On Desktop (Web Browser): Open Gmail on your computer and scroll to the bottom of your inbox. In the lower left corner (or bottom center), you’ll see a small gray bar showing how much storage you’ve used out of 15 GB (e.g. “3.42 GB of 15 GB used”). This indicator gives a quick snapshot of your usage. You can even click it – it will open the Google One storage page for a detailed breakdown.

For more detailed info, clicking the storage bar opens your Google account’s Storage page. There, Google shows how your 15 GB is divided between Gmail, Drive, and Photos. For example, you might discover Gmail is using 10 GB, Drive 4 GB, and Photos 1 GB. This insight is useful – if Gmail itself is the biggest chunk, cleaning up Gmail will have the most impact. If Drive or Photos are larger, you’ll want to address those too (we’ll cover that later).

On Mobile: The Gmail mobile app doesn’t prominently display your storage usage, but you have a couple of options:

• Use the Google Drive app: Open the Google Drive app (which every Google account user has). Tap the menu (☰) and you’ll see a storage meter at the top or bottom showing how much of your 15 GB is used.
• Use the Google One app: If you have the Google One app (Google’s storage management app), open it and tap Storage. It will show a breakdown just like the web, with sections for Gmail, Drive, and Photos usage.
• Via Account Settings: You can also go to your Android’s Settings > Google > Manage Your Google Account > Account Storage (or similar path on iOS through the Gmail app’s settings) to view the storage split.

Identify What’s Taking Up Space: Once you see your storage breakdown, determine how much Gmail is using and what within Gmail might be hogging space. Typically, the biggest space consumers in Gmail are:

• Emails with large attachments (photos, videos, PDFs, etc. embedded in emails).
• Thousands of old emails that have accumulated over years.
• Spam or Trash folders that haven’t been emptied (yes, deleted emails still occupy space until permanently removed).
• Promotional/newsletter emails – individually small but collectively numerous.

Google’s Storage Manager (accessible via the Google One storage page) can highlight categories like “Large attachments in Gmail” or “Emails in Spam/Trash” for you. But even without that, you now have a sense of whether it’s Gmail that needs the most cleaning or if Google Drive/Photos are the culprits. In the next sections, we focus on Gmail-specific cleanup methods. (If Drive/Photos are a big part of your used space, skip ahead to Remove Google Drive and Google Photos Clutter.)

Methods to Free Up Space in Gmail

Once you know Gmail is a significant part of your storage usage, it’s time to clear out the clutter. Below are several effective methods to free up space in Gmail. You can mix and match these tips – each will contribute to lowering your storage usage. For best results, tackle them in roughly this order (since deleting large items yields the quickest space savings):

Delete Large Emails & Attachments

One of the fastest ways to free up Gmail space is to find and delete emails with large file attachments. Just a few big attachments (like videos or hefty PDFs) can occupy hundreds of megabytes. Gmail provides powerful search filters to help identify these big emails:

1. Use Gmail’s size search operator: In the Gmail search bar, type a query like:

has:attachment larger:10M


then hit Enter. This will search for all emails (in any folder) that have attachments larger than 10 MB. You can adjust the number – e.g., larger:5M for >5MB attachments, or larger:20M for huge files. Gmail’s search supports specific size filters; for example, to find emails bigger than 5 MB you can search size:5m or larger:5m. All messages meeting the criteria will be listed.

2. Review and delete unnecessary large emails: Scan the search results – you might see old emails where someone sent you a big PDF, a ZIP file, photos, or videos. If you don’t need those messages or attachments anymore, select them (you can click the checkbox at the top to “Select all” results if you have many) and click the Trash (Delete) icon. They will be moved to Trash (we’ll empty the trash in a later step). Be sure to save any attachments you might need before deleting the email – for instance, download important PDFs to your computer or move photos to Google Drive/Photos – because deleting the email will remove the attachment from Gmail.

Gmail doesn’t allow partial deletion (you can’t delete just the attachment and keep the email), so if an email’s attachment is the space hog, you have to delete the whole message to free space. If the email text is important, consider forwarding it to yourself (without the attachment) or copying the content somewhere before deletion.

3. Start with the largest and work downward: A pro-tip is to begin by searching for a very large size, delete those, then gradually lower your threshold. For example, search larger:20M first (these are really huge attachments like videos). After clearing those, try larger:10M, then larger:5M. This way you get the biggest gains first. Each deleted large file could free up tens or hundreds of MB. Ten emails of 10MB each is 100MB freed – that’s 0.1GB.

Take your time reviewing – you might be surprised to find, say, an old 2015 chain email with a 25MB attachment lurking in your account. Deleting it will instantly give you breathing room.

Empty Spam and Trash Folders

Deleting emails is only half the battle – they don’t truly free up space until they’re permanently removed. Gmail’s design is such that when you delete an email, it gets moved to the Trash folder (and Spam is essentially a special folder that also auto-deletes mail after 30 days). Emails in Trash and Spam still count against your storage quota until they’re purged. This means if you delete a bunch of emails and see no change in storage, it’s likely because they’re sitting in Trash.

Empty the Trash: Look at Gmail’s left sidebar and click “More” to reveal the Trash folder (bin icon). Click Trash to view its contents. At the top of the Trash view, you’ll see a message like “Messages that have been in Trash more than 30 days will be automatically deleted.” There will also be an “Empty Trash now” link – click that to permanently delete everything in Trash. Gmail will ask for confirmation (“This action will permanently delete all messages in Trash. Are you sure?”) – confirm it. This will permanently erase those messages, finally freeing up the space they occupied.

Why empty Trash? Because an email in Trash is not in your Inbox, but it’s still occupying your account’s storage. Until you empty it (or wait 30 days), the space isn’t reclaimed. Think of it like your computer’s recycle bin – you have to empty it.

Empty the Spam: Similarly, find the Spam folder (under “More” as well, with a exclamation (!) icon). Spam emails also count toward your storage. At the top of Spam, click “Delete all spam messages now”. Spam often contains loads of unsolicited emails (sometimes with large attachments or images), so clearing it can free space. Spam auto-deletes after 30 days, but if you’re trying to quickly reclaim space, don’t wait – dump it out.

After emptying Trash and Spam, you should see a noticeable drop in used storage. If you had thousands of messages in Spam/Trash, that could easily be a few hundred MB or more freed. Note: Once emptied, those messages are gone forever from Gmail, so be absolutely sure you don’t need them. (It’s rare you’d need spam, but occasionally people retrieve something mistakenly deleted from Trash – just double-check before emptying.)

Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails

While not an immediate space saver, unsubscribing from mass emails is a preventative step to keep your Gmail from filling up again. Over years, our inboxes get clogged with newsletters, promotions, updates from services, and other automated emails. Individually these may be small (a few kilobytes each), but they come in daily or weekly, piling up to thousands of messages occupying space and clutter.

Take a look at your inbox (especially the Promotions or Updates tabs if you use Gmail’s tabbed inbox). Are there newsletters or promo emails you always delete without reading? Those are prime candidates for unsubscription.

Why unsubscribe? Because if you simply delete them, they’ll be back next week. Stopping them at the source will reduce the influx of new emails and keep your storage lean. Gmail often detects list emails and shows an “Unsubscribe” link at the top of the message (next to the sender’s address) – use it! It sends a request to that sender to remove you from their list.

Some quick ways to mass-unsubscribe or clean out recurring senders:

• Search for “Unsubscribe”: In the Gmail search bar, try typing unsubscribe. This will surface many newsletter emails (because such emails almost always contain an “unsubscribe” link). You can then skim those results for lists you don’t want and unsubscribe one by one. As you unsubscribe, also delete those existing emails.
• Third-party tools: Consider using a service like Unroll.me or Clean Email that can scan your inbox for subscriptions and let you unsubscribe in bulk. For example, Unroll.me provides a dashboard of your email subscriptions and you can tick which ones to cancel. (Be cautious and ensure you trust such services with your email access, as they do require permission to read your inbox. Unroll.me is popular and free, but note that it was known to collect data for marketing in the past; they claim to have ceased that practice, but always do a bit of research).
• Use Gmail filters: An alternative within Gmail is to set up filters for certain senders or keywords. For instance, if you get promotional emails from a particular sender, you can create a filter to automatically delete or archive them. This doesn’t reduce current storage, but it can automatically prevent buildup. However, the best approach is to unsubscribe so you don’t even receive them.

Bulk-delete newsletters: As a one-time cleanup, you can also mass-delete old promo emails. Gmail’s category tabs (Promotions, Social, Updates) segregate these. For example, click the Promotions tab, then click the select-all checkbox. Gmail will select all on the first page, and it will usually show a tiny banner like “All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all X conversations in Promotions.” Click that to select everything in Promotions, then hit Delete. This can purge thousands of emails in one go. Do the same for Social or Updates if desired. Remember to empty Trash after. Be careful: sometimes legitimate emails end up in Promotions/Updates (e.g., order receipts, flight tickets, etc.), so you may want to sort or search within promotions by sender (e.g., keep @paypal.com receipts, delete @mail.paypal.com promos). Use this tactic if you’re confident nothing important is in there or after you’ve saved what you need.

By unsubscribing and culling newsletters, you’ll slow down the rate at which Gmail storage fills up again. Your inbox will also be cleaner and more manageable – an added bonus!

Delete Old Emails in Bulk

Another trove of reclaimable space is years-old emails that you no longer need. Emails from, say, 5-10 years ago could be purged if they’re not important. Many might not have large attachments, but sheer volume can add up. Plus, deleting old correspondence can declutter your account.

Use date search operators: Gmail supports powerful date-based searches. Two handy ones are:

• before:YYYY/MM/DD – finds emails before a specific date.
• older_than: – finds emails older than a certain time period (like months or years).

For example:

• before:2018/01/01 will find all emails older than January 1, 2018 (i.e., all emails from 2017 and earlier).
• older_than:2y finds emails older than 2 years from today.
• older_than:6m finds emails older than 6 months, etc. (y = year, m = month, d = day).

Decide how far back you want to delete. If you’ve never done a big cleanup, you might start with something like older_than:5y to target five-year-old emails and older. Type that in the search box and hit Enter.

Review and select: You’ll get results of very old emails. Likely a lot of them! It could include personal conversations, old notifications, etc. Scroll to see if there are any you might want to keep (some people like to retain sentimental emails or important archives). If the coast is clear, proceed to delete:

Select all results: Click the Select All checkbox. If Gmail says “Select all conversations that match this search” (because the results span multiple pages), click that. Now every email older than that date range is selected – this could be tens of thousands of emails.

Click the Delete button (Trash icon). Gmail will move all those to Trash. This mass deletion might take a bit of time if there are extremely many emails, but Gmail handles it in the background. Important: If you have very old emails that you absolutely never want to lose (e.g., an email from a loved one), you might want to archive those outside Gmail first (we’ll cover archiving soon) or exclude a label from your search. For instance, if you have labeled certain emails as “Keep”, you could do a search like older_than:5y -label:Keep (the minus excludes that label) to avoid deleting those.

After deletion, remember to empty your Trash folder to actually free the space (otherwise those old emails will sit in Trash for 30 days). Once permanently deleted, you should see a good drop in storage usage, especially if your account had thousands of old mails.

Tip: You can combine size and date in searches to target, say, old and large items specifically. For example: older_than:5y larger:1M would find emails older than 5 years that are bigger than 1MB. This is a surgical strike to delete things that are both very old and somewhat large, maximizing space freed with minimal risk of deleting newer needed stuff.

Remove Google Drive and Google Photos Clutter

It’s possible your Gmail storage issue isn’t just Gmail. Since Google Drive and Photos share that same 15 GB pool, clearing Gmail alone might not solve everything if Drive/Photos are also full. For a complete fix, check those services too:

Google Drive Cleanup: Files in My Drive (documents, PDFs, videos, etc.) can consume a lot of space. Especially large PDFs, videos, or old backups you might have stored.

• Go to Google Drive (the quota view will list items by size). Or, in Drive’s web interface, click Storage in the left menu. You’ll see all files sorted by size, largest first.
• Review the largest files. You might find old project files, videos, or things you don’t need anymore. Download any you want to keep offline, then delete the rest.
• Don’t forget to empty Drive’s trash: in Drive, click Trash > “Empty trash” to permanently remove deleted files.
• Consider files in Shared with me do not count toward your storage (only files you own count), so focus on your My Drive.

Cleaning Drive can free many gigabytes if you have huge files there. For example, a 2 GB video you forgot about is 2 GB of your 15 used.

Google Photos Cleanup: Photos and videos can be silent storage killers. Google Photos used to offer unlimited storage in “High Quality” mode (now called “Storage Saver”), but as of June 2021 even storage-saver uploads count against your quota. If you have been backing up photos in Original Quality, they definitely eat into your storage. Here’s what to do:

• In Google Photos (web or app), use the Storage management tool. On the web, go to photos.google.com/settings and you might see an estimate of how many GB your photos use and a “Manage storage” button. This tool can find blurry photos, screenshots, and large videos for you to review and delete.
• Consider converting originals to compressed (Storage Saver) if you have any. Under Photos settings, there might be an option “Recover storage” which will retroactively compress past originals to save space (note: this is a one-way operation and only applicable if you had original quality items).
• Manually delete unnecessary videos (videos take a lot of space). For instance, old video clips, duplicates, etc.
• If you have thousands of photos and you’re comfortable moving them, you could download them to an external drive and then remove them from Google Photos to free space. But ensure they’re safely backed up elsewhere before deleting.

Tip: In Google Photos, one quick filter is to search for large videos. In the Photos search bar, try searching videos and then sort by newest/oldest; or use the Google One storage manager which highlights large photos/videos.

Adjust backup settings: To prevent future issues, in the Google Photos app, set your uploads to Storage saver quality (slightly reduced quality but good for most uses) so that they use less space. And in WhatsApp (if you use Google Drive to backup WhatsApp), ensure it’s set not to count towards Google Drive (Google announced WhatsApp backups might count in future, so keep an eye on that).

After cleaning Drive and Photos, you might find you’ve freed more space than from Gmail cleanup alone. Many users discover that Google Drive or Photos were actually the main storage hogs. For example, a single large video in Drive or a few hundred high-resolution photos could eclipse the size of all your emails. By tackling all fronts – Gmail, Drive, and Photos – you ensure your overall Google storage is within limits.

Now that we’ve covered cleaning things up, let’s consider an alternative strategy: what if you don’t want to delete certain emails at all? That’s where archiving comes in.

Alternative Solution: Archiving Emails Before Deletion

So far, we’ve focused on deleting content to free up space. But what if your Gmail is full of stuff you really want to keep? Perhaps you have sentimental emails, important records, or data you might need someday. Deleting them, even if they’re old, could be painful or risky. If that’s the case, archiving your emails outside of Gmail is a smart solution.

Why not just use Gmail’s archive button? Gmail’s built-in “Archive” feature (the button that removes the email from Inbox to All Mail) does not free up space – it just moves the message out of your inbox view. The email still lives in Gmail (in “All Mail”), counting toward your 15GB. So, when we talk about archiving to save space, we mean making a backup of your emails outside of Gmail, then deleting them from Gmail. This way, you get the space back, but you retain a copy of those emails elsewhere.

Here are a few archiving approaches:

• Download via Google Takeout: Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) allows you to export your entire mailbox. You can select Gmail and it will produce an MBOX file containing all your emails. You can then store that file on your computer or an external drive. It’s a good one-time backup. However, it’s not very granular (you get everything), and accessing emails from an MBOX requires a mail program.
• Use an Email Client (Outlook/Thunderbird): You can connect an email client to your Gmail via IMAP and download all messages locally. For example, set up Thunderbird (free email app), sync your Gmail (it will download emails to the computer). Once you’ve got them locally, you could even use the client’s export function to save emails or simply keep them in the client. Then you could remove emails from the Gmail server. The downside is this requires some technical steps and the resulting archive is the mail client’s data (for Outlook, PST file; for Thunderbird, mbox).
• Third-Party Backup Tools: There are tools specifically made to back up email accounts. For instance, MailStore Home (for Windows) can pull all your Gmail messages and store them in a searchable archive on your PC. These can be convenient if you want to occasionally update your archive and have a nice interface to read old mails.
• Cloud Email Archiving Services: This is the most convenient for ongoing archiving without manual work. Services like the one we’re about to discuss, Backup Space, can connect to your Gmail and save copies of your emails in their cloud. Think of it as extending your mailbox to another safe location that doesn’t count against your Google quota.

The principle with any of these methods is: preserve first, then delete from Gmail. Once you have an archive of selected emails (for example, all emails older than 3 years), you can confidently go back into Gmail and remove those archived emails. You get the storage back, and if you ever need to view those messages, you can find them in your archive (on your computer or on the backup service).

Archiving is especially useful for:

• Important records: e.g., older business communications, legal correspondence, tax-related emails – stuff you might rarely need, but must not lose.
• Sentimental items: old conversations with friends/family, those emails from someone special, etc. You might not read them often, but you want the ability to.
• Bulk storage management: You might decide, for example, to always keep the last 2-3 years of email in Gmail (for quick access) and archive older emails to an external place. This keeps your live Gmail account slim.

One thing to note: When you archive externally and delete from Gmail, searching old emails becomes a two-step process (search Gmail for recent stuff, search your archive for older stuff). But if the archive is well-organized or searchable (as Backup Space and other services provide), it’s not too difficult.

Next, we’ll introduce Backup Space, a service that offers free email archiving up to 50GB – an excellent option to effortlessly back up Gmail emails before deleting them. This can save you from paying Google for more storage and from losing valuable information.

Introducing Backup Space: Free Email Archiving (Up to 50GB)

After cleaning up as much as possible, you might still have emails you want to keep but not count towards your Gmail limit. Backup Space is a solution designed exactly for this scenario. It’s a cloud-based email backup and archiving service that integrates with Google Workspace and Gmail. The best part? Backup Space offers 50GB of storage completely for free for your archives – that’s over 3 times the storage of a free Gmail account!

In other words, you can archive a huge volume of emails (up to 50 GB worth) from Gmail to Backup Space without paying a dime. This frees up your Google storage while ensuring you still have access to your old messages if needed. Here’s how Backup Space can help and how to get started:

What Backup Space Does: Once you sign up and connect it to your Gmail, Backup Space will securely copy your emails to its cloud storage. You can typically choose what to back up – for example, you might archive all emails older than 1 year, or specific labels. The service keeps your emails (including attachments) safe on their servers (with encryption and even ransomware protection), so you can delete those emails from Gmail confident that a copy exists elsewhere. You can log into Backup Space’s dashboard anytime to search, read, or export those archived emails. Essentially, it becomes your extended mailbox.

Key Benefits:

• Free 50 GB archive: Plenty of space to offload emails before you ever need to consider paying for Google One storage. (For reference, 50GB could hold hundreds of thousands of typical emails.)
• Seamless Google integration: It’s built for Google Workspace/Gmail, so setup is streamlined (OAuth login, no complex config).
• Automated and ongoing backup: You don’t have to manually export or anything; once set, it can continually back up new emails (depending on settings).
• Safety and security: Your data is encrypted and protected. Backup Space touts features like anti-ransomware, multiple backup versions, and long retention. Your archived emails are private to you, and you can choose storage locations in various regions (including Switzerland for strong privacy laws).

How to Sign Up and Use Backup Space (Step-by-Step):

1. Create a Backup Space account: Visit the Backup Space website and sign up for a free account using your Google account. The free plan is selected by default.
2. Connect your Gmail: After signing up, you’ll be guided to connect a data source to Backup Space. Choose Gmail.
3. Start the backup process: Once configured, start the backup. Backup Space will begin fetching your emails. The initial backup might take some time (hours or a day) if you have a lot of data, but it runs in the cloud – you don’t need to keep your PC on; the service handles it. You can usually monitor progress on the Backup Space dashboard.
4. Verify your archive: When the backup completes, you should see your emails listed in Backup Space’s interface. Try searching for a few emails or opening some to ensure everything is there. Backup Space provides full-text search, so you can find messages by keywords, just like in Gmail.
5. Free up Gmail space: Now that your emails are safely archived on Backup Space, you can delete them from Gmail. Since you’ve verified the backup, you won’t lose these emails – they’re in Backup Space. Delete them from Gmail and empty trash. Boom – you’ve freed up space without losing your email history.
6. Ongoing protection: Backup Space can continue to archive new incoming emails if you set it up that way. This means going forward, you might periodically clear Gmail knowing anything important is already copied to Backup Space. The service might backup multiple times a day (the free plan may have a limit on frequency, whereas paid plans do more frequent backups – e.g., up to 24x daily for premium. Even at one backup per day, it’s sufficient for personal use to capture emails daily.
7. Using your archived emails: If you need to access an email you’ve archived and deleted from Gmail, just log in to Backup Space. You can read the email content there and even restore the ones you wish directly in your Gmail inbox thanks to a unique data recovery solution designed with Google.

Backup Space is an excellent compromise between paying Google for more storage and deleting things permanently. It’s like having an attic to store your old but valuable emails – they’re out of the way (so your Gmail house stays clean and under the free limit), but you can get them anytime. And at 50 GB free, most individuals will have more than enough room (remember, 15GB was the problem; 50GB is over three times that).

Call to Action: If your Gmail storage is teetering on full, don’t wait until Google locks down your inbox. Take action now – try out Backup Space’s free plan to effortlessly back up your Gmail. With a quick setup (about 5 minutes to get going), you’ll gain peace of mind and plenty of breathing room. Head over to Backup Space and sign up for free, then follow our guide to reclaim your Gmail space without losing any emails. It’s a win-win: you get a lighter, faster Gmail and a secure archive of your emails protected in the cloud.

Conclusion

Running out of storage on Gmail can be stressful – but as we’ve shown, you have many options to clear space and keep your email flowing. We started by checking your storage and likely found Gmail (along with Drive/Photos) pushing the 15GB limit. Then we applied practical methods to free up space: identifying and deleting large attachments, cleaning out Spam and Trash, unsubscribing from junk mail to reduce future clutter, and bulk-deleting old emails that no longer matter. We also remembered to tidy up Google Drive and Photos, which for many users can be the real storage hogs if not managed.

For emails you simply couldn’t part with, we explored archiving solutions. Instead of leaving those important emails in Gmail (eating up space) or deleting them forever, archiving outside Gmail gives the best of both worlds – your data is saved and your Gmail gets freed up. Backup Space stands out as a convenient, cost-effective way to do this, offering a generous free archiving allowance (50 GB) and easy integration with Gmail. By backing up your emails to Backup Space and then removing them from Gmail, you extended your usable email storage significantly without paying Google or losing information.

With your Gmail storage now under control, your account is safe from hitting the cap where you can’t send/receive emails. You’ve essentially decluttered your digital life: a leaner Gmail means faster search and loading times, and no more annoying “storage almost full” warnings. To keep it that way, periodically repeat some of these steps – maybe set a reminder every few months to clear Trash/Spam, or every year to archive and delete older emails. And keep an eye on your Drive and Photos usage as well.

Lastly, enjoy the peace of mind. You took proactive steps to manage your Gmail storage, and now you won’t have to hastily scramble to free space when something important is stuck in your outbox due to a full quota. Gmail is an amazing service, and with a little housekeeping, you can continue using it freely without running into limits. Happy emailing, and may your inbox forever have space for that next important message!

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