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

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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.