Most of us have a Gmail account these days, but at some point we have all found that the space in the inbox gets filled up pretty quickly. Gmail has a huge 15GB limit, but over the years, email tends to pile up. Luckily, cleaning up your Gmail inbox is easy, thanks to Gmail’s owntools. Read on to find out how to free up space in
your inbox using Google services. Gmail does not have the option to sort files; you cannot get the inbox to display mails alphabetically or size-wise. However, it has a fantastic search function, which can be used to solve the problem easily. Follow the steps given below to clear up the emails that you do not need:
Sign in to Gmail > go to
the Search bar at the top.
Start with clearing out the emails that are taking up the most space. Type Larger:10M in the search bar > hit enter or click the magnifying glass icon. This will find emails taking up more than
10MB space. Now, select the mails you do not want > delete (trash can icon). You can experiment with different file sizes, depending on how much you need to delete.
The next step is to clear out emails that were received long ago. Use Before:YYYY/MM/DD to specify a cut-off date, or older_than:years/ months if you want to search for mails that are one, two or more years/months old. For example, if you want mails that are older than six months, you can type older_ than:6m > press Enter to see the list and then select mails > delete to make space.
You can also use combinations of commands, so if, for example, you want to delete six-month old mails with attachments that are more than 1MB in size, then type the following into search: has:attachment larger:1M older_than:6m > press enter, then see the list, and select items > delete mails.
If you are worried about remembering all these operators, Google can help you there as well. Click on the downward pointing arrow at the right corner of the search bar, and you will see Advanced Search, which lets you apply all these filters in a simple menu. Apart from using Google’s search option in Gmail, you can also try using Find Big Mail app, which automates the process of finding mails that should be deleted and also creates labels so you can find these again later without any difficulty. If you do not mind using a paid service, then there is Mailstrom.
This app can delete up to 660 emails for free, to give you an idea of how it works. Unfortunately, using it beyond this limit involves a monthly payment.
