How to free up space on your Gmail box

The moment that you have been dreading so much for several months (or a few weeks) has finally arrived. You will soon no longer have enough space on your Google storage to receive your daily emails. In any case, this is what Google has just announced to you in an email in which the only solution offered is to subscribe to a paid Google One offer to expand your storage capacity.

With only 15 GB of free space to share between Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, clearing out your inbox, and more generally on all Google services using the allocated storage, quickly becomes essential.

Before you decide to subscribe to the first Google One offer (billed 1.99 euros per month for 100 GB of storage) you can undoubtedly obtain a reprieve. How ? Simply by cleaning up your Google One storage and sorting through your Gmail inbox. Although it is possible to do this manually, the operation can be tedious. To avoid this, Google has integrated a Storage Space Manager into Google One which takes away some of the work.

1. Go to the Storage Space Manager

Open your usual web browser, and go to the Google One Storage Manager. On this page, you can view the occupancy rate of the storage space allocated to you by the different Google applications that you use.

It is also from this page that Google suggests the elements to delete to free up space on the storage shared between Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive etc.

2. Review suggested items

Basically, Storage Manager suggests deleting a number of items: junk emails, emails with large attachments, large files, large photos and videos, etc. Depending on what you store on Google One and how many emails (and their attachments) you have, suggestions for what to delete may vary.

Now click on the button Examine of the first elements suggested. Then select the items you want to get rid of and click DELETE. You can also click directly on Delete all to get rid of all the elements suggested by Google.

In the pop-up that appears, check the option I understand that deleted items cannot be restoredand click Permanently Remove to get rid of it.

Then repeat the operation for each element suggested by Google. You will not only delete data stored in Gmail, but also items hosted on your Google Drive space, or even photos and videos synchronized to your Google Photos account.

In principle, this cleaning wizard should help you delete the majority of unnecessary data without having to manually search for it in the different services (large sent or received emails, trash, junk mail, large photos and videos, etc.)

3. Delete messages by category

By using Google’s Space Manager, you may have been able to get rid of several gigabytes of data. However, it is possible to go even further by manually skimming unnecessary emails from your Gmail inbox.

Your inbox is probably full of missives that are as ephemeral as they are useless, such as newsletters, promotional messages, or even notifications linked to social networks. Generally, these messages end up piling up by the hundreds, or even thousands, and despite their small size, they monopolize a significant amount of space on the free storage allocated to you on Google One.

While it is possible to delete each of these messages one by one, this operation could take you hours. To go faster, you can ask Gmail to organize your messages by classifying them into categories. Once in place, the option allows you to locate these messages much more easily, with each category having its own tab. You will then be able to delete all the messages corresponding to each defined category at once.

To rearrange the display of your emails, from the main window of your inbox, click on the icon showing a toothed wheelthen on See all settings.

In the page of Gmail Settingsgo to the tab Mailboxselect By default in the drop-down menu Inbox typeThen check the options Social networks, Promotions, Notifications, Forums displayed below.

Back in your inbox, your messages have been classified by categories, in tabs. Click on one of them, for example, Promotions, then proceed to delete the messages you don’t want to keep.

If you want to delete all messages in this category at once, check the box Select all at the top left, click Select XXXX conversations in (selected category)then click on the icon of the basket displayed in the toolbar.