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I’ve Run Out of Storage and Can’t See My Gmail. Help!
Before you pay for space beyond the free 15GB, try these ways to trim your files
If your email inbox is overcrowded, paying for extra storage space isn't your only option to declutter.
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I received a message from Google that I would stop receiving emails in less than a month because I’ve used up all my Google account storage. It informed me that incoming emails would bounce back to the sender with no way for me to recover them later. Is this true? Please advise. — David M.
David, the message you received from Google is very real and reflects the 15 gigabytes (GB) of storage you get gratis as part of your Google account.
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Emails alone don’t typically consume a ton of space, so on the surface the free 15GB allotment may seem generous. A free Outlook.com account that you may remember as Hotmail has the same limits.
Apple users get a third less free iCloud storage. But AOL and Yahoo! offer 1 terabyte (TB), which is 1,000GB or 1 million megabytes, if you’re willing to see ads with your email, as also happens with Gmail. The two offering the most storage have had security breaches in the past.
Google’s quota is shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos. If you have a lot of pictures or large attachments in those places, you can exhaust your online locker all too quickly.
Other items you might not think of can also eat up space. One example Google mentions are backups of WhatsApp messages and media.
Receiving mail won’t be your only problem
Google’s limit not only inhibits your ability to receive new emails but also to send them. You won’t be able to upload fresh files or images to Google Drive or back up pictures and videos to Google Photos, among other restrictions.
This may not apply to you, David, but Google says anyone who has been over their quota for two years or more is at risk of all of their content being deleted from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive and other services. Google promises to alert you at least three months before the execution date, giving you an opportunity to download your stuff.
If you’re not sure how much space you’ve used or have left, click your user profile in the top right corner in Gmail or Google Drive for a quick check.
That brings me back to your current options:
- You can pay Google for more storage.
- Or do your darndest to free up space.
First, clean up your files
Let’s begin with the latter. The first thing to do is clean up files that may no longer be useful. Some strategies:
Identify large attachments. Try to locate emails that carry a sizable payload or attachment.
Launch Gmail on a browser or the Gmail app on your smartphone. In the Search Mail box on your computer or Search in Mail box on a phone, type something along the lines of has:attachment larger 10mb, which is megabytes, or whatever size restriction you want to use.
A list of emails with such attachments appears. Choose messages that you’re ready send off to pasture, and tap or click the trash can icon to, well, trash them.
Accept Google suggestions. Open the Google Drive app on your mobile device or navigate to drive.google.com on a computer.
On a phone, click the ☰ hamburger menu in the upper left, then Storage. You will also see Storage listed on the left rail of your browser when you visit Google Drive.
At the next screen, click Clean up space. Google suggests ways to declutter.
On my phone, the prime offenders were what Google deemed “large” Drive files that collectively took up 14 GB, and large photos and videos that took up 3 GB. In each case, you can click or tap a Review button to cherry-pick files you can safely dispose of or those you’d like to retain.
You can also clean up storage by services: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos. When I selected Gmail, Google segregated emails by large attachments, by spam and by messages still in the Trash. From there, I could wade through what to get rid of.
Unsubscribe from promotions and newsletters you don’t read. Select Promotions from the left rail of Gmail and examine all those emails of people trying to sell you, persuade you and more.
If you’re like me, you may not even recall signing up for some newsletter you’re now receiving. Delete with abandon and where possible, unsubscribe.
Download files to your device. If you have capacious storage on your phone, tablet or computer and don’t care that pictures, messages and so on are not shared across all your devices, you can delete items from your cloud storage and just park everything on the device.
Empty the trash. Consider this a friendly reminder to empty the trash, though if you do nothing, items will be permanently deleted past 30 days anyway. In the interim, files stuffed in this online garbage can still count against your storage limits.
To get rid of files in trash immediately, go to drive.google.com on a browser, or open the Google Drive app. Click or tap Trash, and for one last time, look over the files in there to make sure you see nothing you want to preserve. When satisfied, choose Empty Trash | Delete Forever.
Reduce photo quality in Google Photos. All the pictures and videos backed up in Google Photos that were taken after June 1, 2021, count toward your Google account limits.
Images backed up before then in what were then known as High quality or Express quality photos don’t count against your allotment.
Nowadays, Google refers to these High or Express quality pictures as Storage saver images, since they can indeed save you some space if you opt to back up files in this resolution rather than choosing the Original option, or the same resolution at which they were captured. The downside is that the resolution of Storage saver pics is slightly reduced compared to the Originals.
You frankly may not notice much of a difference. But if you’re a photo stickler who wants the best possible resolution, the tradeoff effectively becomes one of quantity over quality.
Then, maybe, pay for more storage
If you find that removing files piecemeal or even in bulk still doesn’t get you much below your free 15GB limit or that you’re wedded to keeping more files than you initially expected, you may have to bite the bullet and purchase extra storage.
Google One pricing is as follows, but keep in mind that the most expensive plans are overkill for typical consumers. Beyond 15GB, if you previously got extra storage as part of a promotion, you get to keep that storage too, at least until the promotion expires.
The least expensive “standard” option gives you 200GB for $2.99 a month/$29.99 a year. Prices go up to $149.99 a month for 30TB with no option to pay annually.
All monthly plans at $19.99 or more include Google’s Gemini Advanced artificial intelligence tools and other benefits. Premium plans let you share storage with up to five other people.
Bonus tip: Create an additional Google account
Google accounts come with 15GB of free storage. But nothing stops you from creating a second Google Account or even a third, each of which would also be issued 15GB.
Once established, you can use a secondary Gmail account to serve as an archive for all the old messages you want to keep, though the process can be a bit arduous for a nontechie, and transferring large amounts of emails may take some time.
The idea is that after forwarding old mail from your current Gmail account to the new account, you can erase the messages from the original.
Though the steps are more numerous than I can go into here, begin the process of creating that additional account by opening Gmail. Click on your profile picture | +Add Another Account | Use Another Account | Create Account.
In the original Gmail account, click on the gear for ⚙️ Settings | See all settings and choose the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
Under that, choose Enable POP for all mail, and among other options, archive Gmail’s copy or delete Gmail’s copy.
Eventually, in the new account, head to ⚙️ Settings and start with options under Accounts and Imports tab. Since some choices are rather geeky, seek assistance from a techie pal if possible.
Though users can create several accounts, you might not have the best experience because you’ll have old and new files being stored in different accounts. To find something, you would have to search each of your accounts, and those new accounts will have their own Google Drive and photos storage.
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