Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Expect the unexpected – Recover Exhausted Space in Gmail!

When Gmail first came up with 1 GB (and counting…) of storage space, who thought if anyone ever is going to exhaust this limit. Afterall each one of us was mostly sing email services that provided 2-10MB of space. Well then Gmail storage limit went up to more than 7GB (currently 7376MB).

Ever wondered what would happen when you exhaust the limit? No need to guess have a look at the screenshot below.

Yeah that’s true! I exhausted the limit in my very first gmail account (opened in early 2005) and am 3 MB less than 7376MB limit.

Now as I sit down to delete unwanted mails here’s a tip that you can too use in your turn. Say for example the secret behind my exhausting the 7GB space is subscribing to a lots of Yahoo Groups, many of which delivered mails with attachments, one of which is Chumma that delivered more than 20 thousand emails with attachments in last few years. If I delete all the mails from there I can recover a lot of space. This can be done using “Filter” facility. Click on “Create a filter”

Enter “Chumma” in the Subject field, needless to say all mails from each group have a string in the subject. Click on “Next Step”

Now check “Delete it” and “Also apply filter to…” and click on “Create Filter”. This will delete all the existing mails from the group and delete all future mails too.

Let me get back to work of deleting the files as the group that I mentioned above would be the last one to go for deletion.

Update: After deleting a lot of emails and emptying the trash, I ended up with 30% free space. Ironically the trash page asks “Who needs to delete when you have over 7000 MB of storage?!”