Just wondering if everyone is ever content with their Gmail Storage limit? I know that Google takes it all into account (Gmail, Drive, Photos). I’ve used almost 75% of my Gmail. I have a 38 GB limit on mine. The early days of referrals. I have about 5GB in Drive, and I don’t use their Photos.
Wondering if I should take the plunge of just upping it to Google One. How much pruning does everyone do with their emails?
If emails come with PDFs, for example, do you delete the email after downloading the PDF? For reference, I use Spark on all my devices.
I try to be content but not complacent in all things.
It’ll probably take you a long time to fill that last ~10GB so I wouldn’t upgrade to One unless you want the features.
If you do run out of space, the $20/year for 100GB is enough for a lifetime unless you start heavily using Drive.
If you want to prune big files, doing it 1-2 times a year with a search like size:10000000 (10MB or larger attachments) takes way less time than pruning as you go.
What I usually do with Gmail, every couple of years is…
Search for items older than x years (depending on your needs, but I tend to keep five to ten years of email there) – you can accomplish this using the before:2020-12-31 (to search for items older than 31 Dec 2020) filter.
Select all (make sure to select the Select all items matching this query or whatever it says after you click the Select all checkbox – otherwise, it will select just the items on the first page).
Label as Archived email or similar (come up with a meaningful label name, but it does not matter much). Make sure that this has been applied to all items. This may take some time if there are many items to label.
Go to Google Takeout, and export just that single label as an MBOX file (you can select a single label to export in the Google Takeout/Gmail settings).
Keep that file offline locally, and backed up, and in case you need any of the archived messages, use Thunderbird or Apple Mail to search through the archive.
Delete all messages with the archived label to free up space on Gmail.
Empty trash on Gmail.
I have over 120 GB of archived email locally (going back some twenty years at this point) and have maybe gone into that archive once or twice. I keep important documents (warranties, and anything health-, property-, or finance-related) separately so I rarely need to search through old email for anything of importance.
Just to add that I am still paying for Google One as it’s good value, but I prefer to use storage space for Google Photos and keep the email under 10-15 GB, as I find Google Photos’ search much more useful than having tons of irrelevant email online, and I’m more likely to search for old photos than old email. But your use of Gmail and your needs may vary, of course.
I’m constantly pruning my email. As I’ve mentioned before I have a handful of rules that sort and file my email. One rule looks for the work “unsubscribe” and flags those messages as Review. 99% of the time I give those messages a quick look then delete them.
Keep in mind that you can right click on an email in the browser and choose “Find email from (address) and find all messages from that address. I occasionally use this to manually delete some messages.
Whatever you choose to do I suggest you first export all your email using takeout.google.com. Google exports messages as MBOX files which can be imported by most email client including Mail.app.
I used the Devonthink mail plug-in, downloaded all of my mail, zipped it up and used a script to delete all of my gmails. We shouldn’t use gmail for storage. Thats what Devonthink is for.