Google Gmail now provides over 7.5gb of inbox space, and it’s growing all of the time. This is generally going to be more than adequate for most people, even with hundreds of thousands of emails. However, as there’s a growing trend for forwarding on funny video clips, large image files or high resolution photographs, you may find that you’re getting closer and closer to your limit.
Rather than waiting until you hit or near your message limit, why not be pro-active and clear out some of the old messages, attachments and general junk you’ve accumulated over the years. Follow some of these quick and easy steps and you’ll soon trim your gmail account.
In the search bar, you don’t have to just search for people or subjects, although if you have a regular person forwarding you all the funny clips it might be easier just to identify who that is and clear out some of their old messages.
Otherwise, try some of the following search queries (without the quote marks):
“has:attachment” – used to identify emails that have attachments with them.
“filename:wmv” – probably one of the more usefull queries, it’ll identify all emails with file attachments that are .wmv files. This can be tweaked to identify other non .wmv files by just changing the end bit of the query. So you might want to change this to avi, pdf, ppt, jpg, doc, xls, zip – for example.
“before:2008/01/01 label:sent” – this will show all emails sent before 1st January 2008. If they’re that old, you may not need them any more and it can be a very handy way of clearing out old emails.
Once you have deleted a batch of old emails, don’t forget that to reclaim the space, you also need to go to the ‘Bin’ and empty that.
Gmail unfortunately doesn’t include a facility for sorting emails by file size, but if you would like to do this, you can use a regular email client like Thunderbird or Outlook Express and sync that with Gmail, download your messages and then delete the ones that have the huge attachments. Actually, Gmail currently has a 25mb attachment size limit, but that can rapidly become a problem when you think about the huge numbers of emails that are sent and received every day. All it takes is a little vigilance and you can carry on enjoying this free service from Google without worrying about the size limits.
Any other tips? Please add them in the comments section below.
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