Gmail – Storage Capacity INCREASING BECAUSE OF UPDATES and ARCHIVES folders

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Question 1 – I have an updates folder in my gmail that has thousands of emails that take up storage. If I delete all of these messages, will they also be deleted from the individual folders where I saved them?

Question 2 – I have thousands of emails in my archives folder that take up storage. If I delete all of these messages, will they also be deleted from the individual folders where I saved them?

Best Answer

Yes, emails will be deleted from all folders in both scenarios you described.

Gmail does not have concept of folders, it has tags or labels. Same email can have update label, and any other label, it will appear in both labels. Deleting it from anywhere will delete it in all labels.

Update is a label. Archive means its no longer in Inbox.

Try to search by size: operator in Gmail to find bigger emails, as described at Gmail Search Operator Page

size:10000 // 10000bytes

larger:5M //larger than 5MB

Make sure to empty trash to recover storage space. If you are still facing storage full, consider buying in 100GB total for $20/year or $2/month via Google One.

Related Solutions

Gmail – How to Clean Out Inbox

You will first need to separate the messages that you want to keep from those you want to delete.

I'm not sure I understood the question entirely, but there are a few methods to do this:

Use a search query to filter on those that you want to keep (e.g. label:list from:me), then either use this query negated in the next step, or star/label these messages.
Go through the 60K+ messages manually. As you do so, you should either star them or add them to a label.
Search for messages that you know you want to keep based on keywords and manually mark them with a star or label. As you do this, you should negate those that have already been selected to keep the list small. So for example, if you know that a message you want to keep has the words "save this", you would run "save this" -is:starred, then select the messages and star them.
You might already have the messages in a specific label, in which case you are ready for the next step.

Now you can simply run a query to select all those messages you want to delete and subtract those that you want to keep. Simply run a query such as: label:list -is:starred. Next, select all the messages in the list (you will need to tell Gmail to select all messages not just the first 20 by clicking the link above the list of messages). Once all of them are selected, you can simply delete them.

In case you want to use a label instead of stars, simply use -label:foo instead of -is:starred in your query.

Gmail – Deleting Emails from a Folder if Not Contained in Another Folder

You won't be able to do it with a filter, because those act when the message comes in. However, it's simple to do with a search.

label:first -label:second

That search string will return all conversations with the label first and do not have the label second. The minus sign (- or hyphen, if you prefer) means negation.

More information about search operators is available at Advanced search.

If you want to exclude more labels, simply add them to your search string:

label:first -label:second -label:third

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Gmail – How to Clean Out Inbox

Gmail – Deleting Emails from a Folder if Not Contained in Another Folder

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