Need More Space for Gmail? Get Back 15GB Without Losing Anything

Is your inbox full? Maybe you didn’t unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read, or you forgot to delete a bunch of spam emails and suddenly used up your 15 GB of free storage on your Gmail account. These days, it doesn’t take long for your inbox to fill up with thousands of unread messages.

You may have been meaning to clear out your Gmail inbox, but the thought of sifting through countless old messages seems daunting. Luckily, there’s an easy way to free up space in your Google account while still keeping all your old emails.

All you need to do is create a second Gmail account to store all your current emails. There is no limit to the number of free Google accounts you can have, meaning you can set up one as a dedicated archive account and then migrate all your old emails to it.

Transferring your Gmail messages is also a great strategy if you have a Gmail account through school or work that you won’t have regular access to. Most universities and companies deactivate your account once you’re no longer a student or employee, so if you want to view your old messages and files, you’ll need to transfer them to your personal account before you lose access.

It doesn’t take long to complete the entire process of transferring Gmail messages to your new account. too long, but it will depend on how many emails you have. We’ll walk you through the simple process of moving email from your old account to your new one (including the important step of backing everything up).

To learn more about Gmail, check out the new AI-powered summaries or learn how to use emoji reactions.

How much data can be stored in Gmail?

15GB of free storage may seem like a lot when you sign up for a Gmail account, but it fills up quickly. For starters, the 15GB isn’t just used for email: it also includes files saved in Google Drive and Google Photos.

If you frequently send or receive messages that contain large files, such as videos, or if you tend to upload a lot of photos and videos to Google Photos, you will soon see a notification saying “Account storage is full.” This means that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails on this account, so you should do something about it as soon as possible.

The quickest solution is to upgrade to a Google One account. But even if you go for the cheapest plan — 100GB for $20/year — you’ll still be paying to store old emails you may no longer need.

If you don’t want to buy more space, you can always delete old emails. You can get back a surprising amount of space by moving large files to the trash. Gmail makes it easy to identify and delete files by size. Still, this option can seem tedious; you may not want to spend hours sifting through correspondence from a decade or more ago, deciding which memories to keep and which to get rid of forever.

You can always download larger files to your desktop before deleting them from your Google account, but you’ll likely run into the same problem with local files at some point and need to manage storage space on your device.

Which brings us to our “alternative solution”: moving all your emails to a new Gmail account.

How to Transfer Gmail Messages to a New Email Account

Before you begin the Gmail transfer process, we recommend that you make a backup of your emails. You can do this by downloading your emails to your computer or an external hard drive. You can delete the backup once your emails have finished transferring to your new account if you wish, but it’s always a good idea to have a backup stored locally.

To back up your Gmail messages, go to Google Takeout. Using our test Gmail account, which had about 75,000 messages, we downloaded them from Google Takeout in about 2 hours.

Once you have saved a copy of your emails, you can start sending them. Here are the steps you need to take:

Start by logging into your original Gmail account, clicking the “gear” icon in the upper right corner, and clicking View all settings.
Choose POP/IMAP redirection card and select an option Enable POP for all emails (POP stands for Postal Protocol).
Below you will find some options When accessing messages is done using the POP protocolTo automatically delete emails from the original account after the transfer, select remove copy from gmail.
To choose save Changes.

Now it’s time to create a new account and migrate all your messages to it:

If you haven’t already, create a new Gmail account with a clean inbox. We’ll call this your archive account.
Log in to your new archive account, click the gear icon at the top and select View all settings.
Choose Accounts and import tab at the top, then select Add email account Near Check your email on other accounts.
In the pop-up window, enter your original Gmail account name. Select Next.
To choose Import emails from my other account (POP3)ANDto choose Next Again.

Enter your original Gmail account password. You may also be required to create a Google app password (see note below).

To choose 995 under the port.

Check these 3 boxes: Always use a secure connection (SSL) when downloading email, Marking incoming messages, Archive incoming messages (skip inbox)

To choose add Account.

You will probably need to create a Google app password to transfer your Gmail messages

We tested this Gmail transfer process twice, and both times, the standard Gmail password didn’t work. After a little research, we determined that we’d need to create a temporary “app password” to sync the accounts.

Google app passwords are 16-digit passcodes created for “less secure” apps or devices to access your Google account. They work exactly like your Google password.

If your regular Google password doesn’t work for Gmail syncing, visit https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords to create an app-specific password. Simply create a password name — we used “Transfer Bulk Email” — then hit the Create button. You’ll get a pop-up with a new 16-digit password.

Once you have created an app-specific password, return to step 6 of the instructions above and use your new app-specific password in place of your regular password.

Important: Google will only display your app-specific password once. Once you create it, you can’t request to display it again, so be sure to write it down or save it in some other way after creating it.

Google’s own Help Center mentions that “application-specific passwords are not recommended and are unnecessary in most cases.” So once you’re done migrating your Gmail messages, we recommend removing the application-specific password.

What happens after I sync my Gmail accounts?

Once you have successfully connected your new archive Gmail account to your original account, your emails should begin migrating automatically. This process may take several hours or days, depending on how many emails you have.

In our test account with about 75,000 messages, we noticed that it took Gmail about 2 days to migrate all the messages from the original account to the new, archived email account.

Important: After moving Gmail messages to an archived email account, your original Gmail account will put all messages in the Trash folder, which you will have to empty manually. It took about an hour to delete those 75,000 messages from the Trash.

Before migrating Gmail messages, our test account was using just over 12GB, or 80% of Google’s free 15GB. After migrating, the account was using just 0.66GB, of which 0.06GB was from Gmail.

What Gmail messages won’t be migrated?

We discovered that Gmail had moved all of our messages except for two categories – Drafts and Spam.

You have to manually decide what to do with your drafts. Spam messages are automatically deleted every 30 days, so you can either let Gmail handle it or go to the Spam folder yourself after the mail is transferred and delete or forward the messages.

Once all your emails have been imported to your new account, enjoy the inbox zero experience. You’ve given your original account a new lease on life.

At this point, you’ll need to complete two final steps: stop the automatic transfer process so you can continue using your original account, and remove the app-specific password if you had to create one.

Log in to your new account, go to Settings and choose View all settings.

Choose Accounts and import card and then select remove for your original account (under Check your email on other accounts.)

When asked to do so Confirm email account deletionto choose APPROX.

If you had to create a Google Apps password and want to remove it now, go back to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and click the trash can icon next to the password you created.

Congratulations, you’re done!

An important note at the end: Google will delete accounts that have been inactive for more than two years, so make sure you don’t completely ignore all your old emails after they’ve been transferred. If you don’t plan on using your archive account regularly for sending emails, you can still keep the account active by logging in at least once every two years.