Given the pace at which emails arrive in our inboxes, it’s easy to let them take over and get out of control. Before you know it, you’re getting full storage warnings from Google or Microsoft threatening to prevent you from receiving new emails. One easy way to overcome this is to pay Google/Microsoft for additional storage. If you would prefer to make room by taking a bit of time to sift through and delete some emails, the following tips may be helpful.
Help Your Future Self
It seems every time I buy somethings I get added to the seller’s email list, whether I want to be or not. One way to help get your email under control is to unsubscribe from marketing emails you don’t need. It’s easy enough to delete them when they arrive, but why not save yourself the trouble?
All marketing emails should have an unsubscribe link in the footer. It might be labeled “change your email preferences” or something similar. Here is an example:
Gmail and Outlook offer additional options to unsubscribe for your convenience. Unfortunately, the Outlook option is only available for personal accounts. Here are screenshots of each method:
Get the Low-Hanging Fruit
No matter how many messages may be languishing in your account, it can be difficult to know where to start. To get the most bang for your buck, you can sort your inbox by message size and delete the largest ones first.
Gmail
To bring the largest emails to the top in Gmail, we’ll use a filter. To access filters, click on the icon at the right end of the search field:
On the next screen, choose a size limitation. In this case, I have chosen 5MB:
Then click the blue search button.
Chances are, the emails on the first page will have attachments or embedded images that are eating up valuable space. If you no longer need those emails, download whatever attachments or images you’d like to save to your computer or removable drive, and then delete the emails. You’ll be amazed how fast your storage empties out.
Outlook
In Outlook, you can click the header of the “size” column to order messages by size. If you only see small sizes, click the size column header again to sort descending.
Alternatively, click View in the top menu, and then Arrange By. Select size:
If you don’t see a size column in your message list, click on View in the top menu, and then click the three dots at the end of the submenu. Select Add Columns to add the size column to the view.
Want More Tips?
The folks at Tech-Talk have an additional tip to help you clean out your inbox that they call “chunking.” To learn more about chunking, check out their article, Quick Steps to Clean Out Your Inbox. For more tips on managing email, browse their articles and videos under the Email topic.
