Folks call me frugal, and several other adjectives, but I prefer not to spend money when I don’t need to. So I don’t pay for extra space on Google for my Gmail. That does mean that I have a part time job doing something I should be doing anyway: being responsible for the disk space I use.
If you are out of space & Google is bouncing back your Gmail, holding you hostage for just $10/month for life, then you need to shed some space fast. Lets see where the low hanging fruit is.
Promotions Google does a decent job of automatically tagging sales emails as promotions. Isolate these emails older than a few months and also with more than 200 kb of space so that you can quickly free up some space. You can put the words larger:200K in:Promotions in the search string of Gmail, or click this handy link: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/larger%3A200K+in%3APromotions
Then click on the “Any time” button (in yellow below) and select Older than one month because it’s even less likely something you care about will be in this list. Now you can select all on that page by checking the box above all the emails and delete them all at once after a quick glance that there’s nothing you need there.
You can reduce the size in larger or remove it to select more messages, it was only there to help us hurry up and create some space. But before you do, you will want to make sure you are seeing more than the default 25 messages per page. Click the Gear near the top right, then select See all settings. Scroll down to the Maximum page size option under the General tab, change the number of conversations per page to 100 using the dropdown, and then click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Once you are confident that you are not going to miss Promotions, and you have deleted a few pages of emails, Gmail will offer “Select all conversations that match this search.” You can click that and whack hundreds at a time. It takes a few minutes for what you deleted to no longer appear in subsequent searches.
In good practice, you still haven’t actually deleted anything. Gmail is just putting it in the Trash for 30 days. You have to select the Trash label, select all the messages (there’s a single click for that) and then “Delete Forever”. That will permanently remove these messages from your total space count and you will have no way to restore them. I have no way to prove it, but if Google wanted to keep those “deleted” messages to train their models to craft campaigns specifically for you, they would: and they don’t have to tell you. But I digress.
