Emails can eat up Google data limits

As charges loom, it’s time to clear out your inbox

Since Google stopped providing unlimited storage in Google Photos June 1, some of you may worry that excess cat photos will push you into paying for extra storage or finding another place to back up your pictures.

But this space crunch might not hinge on images at all, because Google’s 15-gigabyte limit for no-charge storage covers not just Google Photos but also Google Drive and Gmail.

Although an individual email might not seem like much, a thousand words can be worth a picture – especially if they were sent in an attached PDF or came woven into enough web coding.

Even plain-text messages add up for those who opened a Gmail account early after the service debuted in 2004 with the pitch “Don't throw anything away.” In my own Google account, Google Photos amounts to half of my combined Drive and Gmail storage.

Gmail’s inbox-management tools still assume that storage isn’t as big a problem as search. You can use special queries to find bulkier messages (“larger:10m” locates those bigger than 10 megabytes), but Google PR confirmed that you can’t ask Gmail to rank the mailing lists that put the biggest dent in your quota.

Neither Gmail’s web interface nor its Android and iOS apps even let you sort messages by sender, which could suggest the more prolific correspondents. To do that, you’ll have to synchronize Gmail to a desktop mail app like what Apple includes in macOS and Microsoft bundles with Windows.

Or maybe it’s already obvious which attention-starved companies, nonprofit groups or political campaigns make it up in volume.

Once you identify your major mail offenders, you will want to return to Gmail’s website, which functions better than its apps for zapping messages in bulk. Here’s how:

Search for the sender or subject you want gone and select a message matching what you had in mind. If it’s a mailing list you want to escape (as opposed to a short-shelf-life list), open it to click its unsubscribe link.

If the group involved has you on multiple lists, select a message you know you don’t want, click the vertical ellipsis above it, select “Filter messages like these,” and in the dialogue, click the blue Search button. That should collect only messages on the same list.

Click the checkbox at the top left corner of the search results to select every message on the page. If more than 100 surface, click “Select all conversations that match this search” (as in, where Gmail should report how many matched your query and what they added up to).

Click the trash icon.

There are better ways to help people deal with high-volume mailing lists, and one of Google’s competitors in email provided a good example almost nine years ago: Microsoft’s Outlook.com lets you set “sweep” filters that automatically delete matching messages after a set interval.

Google acts as if it’s made deleting messages obsolete even as it steps up efforts to charge for storage.

Google could improve its messaging about those extra-storage prices: Unless you know you will conquer your storage problem in the next few months, you should probably ignore Google’s advertised $1.99 monthly rate for its entrylevel 100-gigabyte plan and pay the 16% cheaper $19.99 annual rate instead.