Gmail storage full? How to fix?

I wasn't sure where to post this so I'm posting it here.

I keep getting told by gmail that my storage in 99% full. TBH I think they just want me to upgrade the storage and pay them a premium but I don't want another subscription.

I went through my inbox and deleted what I could but I just can't get it down. Does anyone know how I can lower the percentage so that I don't have to pay them? I really don't want to have to make a new gmail account.

Thanks!

I solved it by buying a $2 per month One subscription, it was the easiest way to solve it.

I dealt with this recently and started off by clearing some of my old attachments since that's what Gmail was recommending.

I get not wanting to have yet another subscription as I'm tired of everything being a subscription. I managed to resolve this and bring my storage down by deleting emails in the promotions and social tabs. I had around 6k emails in the social tab and 29k in the promotions tab. If you click the checkbox to bulk select, there's a button you can select that says "Select all xx,xxxx conversations in Social". Click that and then delete them.

Gmail will send these to your trash bin and delete them after 30 days. If you need the storage space now, you can manually empty the trash bin and reclaim the storage space.

As a heads up, Gmail can get a little laggy whilst it works on this depending on how many emails you're deleting.

29dogs said:

I wasn't sure where to post this so I'm posting it here.

I keep getting told by gmail that my storage in 99% full. TBH I think they just want me to upgrade the storage and pay them a premium but I don't want another subscription.

I went through my inbox and deleted what I could but I just can't get it down. Does anyone know how I can lower the percentage so that I don't have to pay them? I really don't want to have to make a new gmail account.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Um deleted old emails!? Do you need copies off stuff in gmail from 2023?

t2van said:

Um deleted old emails!? Do you need copies off stuff in gmail from 2023?

Click to expand...

I need my 2004 emails, got some fine lovely spam back in the days, don`t touch my love letters.

Dopious said:

I solved it by buying a $2 per month One subscription, it was the easiest way to solve it.

Click to expand...

But I don't want another subscription.

Like imagine if you have to pay $2 a month for a hundred different things. That's $200 a month that's getting sucked out of my bank! Just cause I can afford it doesn't mean I want to give it to Google and everything else penny pinching me.

Zwielicht said:

I dealt with the recently and started off by clearing some of my old attachments since that's what Gmail was recommending.

I get not wanting to have yet another subscription as I'm tired of everything being a subscription. I managed to resolve this and bring my storage down by deleting emails in the promotions and social tabs. I had around 6k emails in the social tab and 29k in the promotions tab. If you click the checkbox to bulk select, there's a button you can select that says "Select all xx,xxxx conversations in Social". Click that and then delete them.

Gmail will send these to your trash bin and delete them after 30 days. If you need the storage space now, you can manually empty the trash bin and reclaim the storage space.

As a heads up, Gmail can get a little laggy whilst it works on this depending on how many emails you're deleting.

Click to expand...

I didn't think to check those tabs I was only looking at attachments like Google showed me. I will look at that later to see if that helps.

How much space did you manage to clear down by doing this?

t2van said:

Um deleted old emails!? Do you need copies off stuff in gmail from 2023?

Click to expand...

Yes! I sometimes keep stuff in there in case I ever need it to prove something. Maybe I don't need all of them but I haven't found the time to go through them individually.

29dogs said:

But I don't want another subscription.

Like imagine if you have to pay $2 a month for a hundred different things. That's $200 a month that's getting sucked out of my bank! Just cause I can afford it doesn't mean I want to give it to Google and everything else penny pinching me.

I didn't think to check those tabs I was only looking at attachments like Google showed me. I will look at that later to see if that helps.

How much space did you manage to clear down by doing this?

Yes! I sometimes keep stuff in there in case I ever need it to prove something. Maybe I don't need all of them but I haven't found the time to go through them individually.

Click to expand...

I'm paying over £150 for my Google emails. $2 a month is fuck all.

I think if you have to worry about proving something after 3 years you can get away with it.

If you was a larger business id understand keeping 6 years plus but then you wouldn't be quibbling over 2 dollar.





@Dopious clearly a digital horder

Just pay for the upgrade like £1.50 for month not much money if not you will find it will become problem all the time even if you delete a lot it will happen again soon enough.

29dogs said:

I didn't think to check those tabs I was only looking at attachments like Google showed me. I will look at that later to see if that helps.

How much space did you manage to clear down by doing this?

Click to expand...

Well, the most recent email they sent me on January 28th said that my storage was nearly full at 98% (14.83GB out of the 15GB limit)


After deleting the promotion and social tab emails, I brought it down to 59% (8.87GB).


If you decide to do this, make sure those emails aren't actually useful to you. For me, it was mostly just Linkedin and Nextdoor nonsense in the social tab and the promotions were essentially just spam.

Are you using an Android phone?

Do you have Whatsapp, Photos etc. set to backup to your drive?

The storage is shared between Gmail and apps that backup.

29dogs said:

I wasn't sure where to post this so I'm posting it here.

I keep getting told by gmail that my storage in 99% full. TBH I think they just want me to upgrade the storage and pay them a premium but I don't want another subscription.

I went through my inbox and deleted what I could but I just can't get it down. Does anyone know how I can lower the percentage so that I don't have to pay them? I really don't want to have to make a new gmail account.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

download thunderbird or something
saved ur emails and back them up
delete the rest
although, unless ur email is very heavy rich in html or files
the problem is most likely elsewhere, maybe ur google drive and photos
just click https://drive.google.com/drive/quota
should bring u to a page where it breaks down what u have
delete what u dont need

ps. if u have lots of "bakup" files in ur google drive
u can always move that to a "spare" gmail acc instead if u dont use it regularly.

Rem said:

download thunderbird or something
saved ur emails and back them up
delete the rest
although, unless ur email is very heavy rich in html or files
the problem is most likely elsewhere, maybe ur google drive and photos
just click https://drive.google.com/drive/quota
should bring u to a page where it breaks down what u have
delete what u dont need

ps. if u have lots of "bakup" files in ur google drive
u can always move that to a "spare" gmail acc instead if u dont use it regularly.

Click to expand...

Latest thunderbird syncs with gmail now so unless you archive if you delete locally or online it will delete visa versa at least mine does

Isn't it like 15gb free? Then it skyrockets as part of the workspace plans? Consider switching if you don't use any of Google's apps. I use Posteo for personal emails. Simple nononsense email provider. Like 10 cents per alias and 25 cents per GB. And they don't go through your stuff either.

Zwielicht said:

Well, the most recent email they sent me on January 28th said that my storage was nearly full at 98% (14.83GB out of the 15GB limit)
View attachment 4525

After deleting the promotion and social tab emails, I brought it down to 59% (8.87GB).
View attachment 4524

If you decide to do this, make sure those emails aren't actually useful to you. For me, it was mostly just Linkedin and Nextdoor nonsense in the social tab and the promotions were essentially just spam.

Click to expand...

OK this worked for me! I'm down to 68% now so it's much better! Thank you!

BlogPro said:

Are you using an Android phone?

Do you have Whatsapp, Photos etc. set to backup to your drive?

The storage is shared between Gmail and apps that backup.

Click to expand...

Yes I have an android phone but I didn't know about this! Maybe I can lower the usage even more then!

I'll check later but thank you for this!

Rem said:

download thunderbird or something
saved ur emails and back them up
delete the rest
although, unless ur email is very heavy rich in html or files
the problem is most likely elsewhere, maybe ur google drive and photos
just click https://drive.google.com/drive/quota
should bring u to a page where it breaks down what u have
delete what u dont need

ps. if u have lots of "bakup" files in ur google drive
u can always move that to a "spare" gmail acc instead if u dont use it regularly.

Click to expand...

This seems like a really good suggestion! I'll give this one a try later too.

t2van said:

Latest thunderbird syncs with gmail now so unless you archive if you delete locally or online it will delete visa versa at least mine does

Click to expand...

Oh that sucks to hear.

ggmopa said:

Isn't it like 15gb free? Then it skyrockets as part of the workspace plans? Consider switching if you don't use any of Google's apps. I use Posteo for personal emails. Simple nononsense email provider. Like 10 cents per alias and 25 cents per GB. And they don't go through your stuff either.

Click to expand...

Yea 15GB.

I'll switch one day cause of privacy reasons like you said but for storage it took years to hit the limit so at least that won't be a problem for a while now.

After getting storage full, try anyway.. not works.. i tried hard still not work and have to purchase the package.. can't do anything.. It's Google world now.

Actually deleting emails alone doesn't reduce storage space that much. What usually eats up the most storage and what you need to delete from is Google Drive : )

The files stored there are most likely taking up the larger percentage of the storage limit you are experiencing now. The first time I ran into this issue was when I used to back up WordPress sites to Google Drive using UpdraftPlus.

After I hit the storage limit, I eventually checked my Drive and found that I still had site backups from even 2 to 3 years ago just sitting there

I didn't realize that I had set UpdraftPlus to automatically leave a copy on Drive every time a backup ran, so this was going on for a long time until it eventually hit the storage limit

Before I figured out that this was the main cause I had upgraded my storage plan. But once I found the real issue, I just deleted what I did not need anymore from Drive and never had to use the storage subscription again

You should probably look into that as well... it is possible there are files being auto backed up to Drive that you might have forgotten about : )

I had this happen to me.

If you have a website on any web host you might want to check to see if they offer any additional email services. A lot of my own come with the email service as part of the web hosting which means you get a snazzy personal email with your domain at no extra cost. Beats having a generic @gmail.com account.

So what did you end up doing @29dogs bro?