How to Find Large Emails In Gmail And Clean Up Your Inbox

02 Jun How to Find Large Emails In Gmail And Clean Up Your Inbox

If you’ve been using Google services like Gmail and Google Drive, there is a good chance you’re getting close to 15GB Google gives you for free.

To check how much free storage space you have look into the right corner when you’re in your Gmail or other Google apps.

If you are getting close to your limit, the culprit most likely to be your Gmail. Most emails don’t take that much space, however, when someone sends you a big image file or pdf it counts against your allocated storage.

This means that over time you have many big files sitting in your Gmail box taking up space.

So below are quick tips on how to clean up and sort your Gmail inbox so you can delete them and free up valuable space.

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t give the option to sort your emails. But that’s ok because Gmail has an excellent search function, which you can use to find all types of emails based on the size, the date, and other criteria.

So how do you find emails and filter your emails within your Gmail account?

Option 1

First is the quick search box. Use the dropdown selection box Gmail gives to help you with your search.

You can find it right in the search box at the top of your Gmail.

Click on the arrow and you will see a box with different options you can choose from.

You can find images based on their size and also filter them by date, label, and whether they have an attachment or not.

So if you need to find large emails, select size and date (the longest period you can choose is 1 year) and click search. This will give you a list of emails larger than 5MB within the last 12 months.

If you want to go further, you have to do the search again, but this time select last year as a date.

Option 2

The second option is to use search operators

These search operators do the same thing as the search box but allow you to use other criteria for filtering your emails.

Here  is the list of all search operators you can use when searching your Gmail Box (link)

So how do you use these search operators to clean up and delete the emails you don’t want.

When you access your inbox, at the top you will see a search box.

You can then type pre-defined search operators into the search box to find what you need. Below the filters, you’ll probably use most frequently to find emails

To search for emails that are marked important use > is:important

To look for emails during a certain time period use the following operators: after, before: older; newer: So to find emails before 2020, you would type: before:2020

Also, if you notice, after you do the search, at the top you will also notice additional filtering options you can further use to narrow down the results.

To find large emails, you can use size operators: larger; and smaller; So if you need to find large emails, type: larger:2M

If you’re using tabs to organize your email, you can use the filter category to search emails placed in those categories. (ex: category:primary).

Finally, you can also combine filters to drill down even more. So if you want to clean up your Gmail and want to find and remove large emails that you received before 2020 you would type: before:2020 larger:3M and hit search.

I hope this helps you get a better handle on your email. By using the search box and search operators, you can quickly locate and delete old emails that are taking too much space.

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