Gmail – deleting attachments and sorting by size

To tell you the truth, I really did not want to pay gmail for extra space specially because they were charging $20 for 10GB which means an extra 1.5GB apart from their free allowance (which is currently 8.5GB) or $75 for 40GB. Their prices are way beyond what other professional email services charge but because I have had a gmail account for very long, the process of changing emails sounded impossible.

So there began my race for finding a solution to this (race because I had consumed almost 96% of the space) as I did not want to delete the attachments in a hap-hazard manner.

For GMail advanced search options click here -

The search options listed at google are somewhat workable only for a short period of time – how much time can you devote to search for the attachments and classify what is useful or useless.

But don’t bother if you want to sort emails by size or size of attachment as gmail, for some reason, doesn’t support that.

Here is the best solution that I could identify.

Please note that I cannot take credit for the solution as I did see it elsewhere – Digital Inspiration (labnol.org). I have just re-written their process to make it sound easier.

The one advantage of Gmail over others like Yahoo/Hotmail/MSN etc. is that it provides free offline access to your email messages via the IMAP route. IMAP4 adds instant syncronisation with the mail servers (unlike POP3) which means that messages can be deleted on the main server without being downloaded.

For this, you will need to download the software called IMAPSize – Click here to download.

Once you download this, install/run it.

After installation, when you run the program for the first time, you will get a screen like this -

Put in your gmail user-id, password, change port to 993 and tick the bottom two options and finally click OK to set up the account.

Once you do this, the program will check your gmail account and produce a tree showing all your folders, space consumed etc like the image below -

Now you can see which folder/label takes up the amximum space and you can choose which folder you want to check first.

Choose the folder (I chose the main inbox) and double click it and the software will download all the headers/information about the emails from that folder. This may take extremely long depending on the number of message in the inbox. The message are not downloaded, only the heards are downloaded. You will however have the option of downloading email messages and their attachments – to be checked later. Here is a screen shot after the headers are downloaded -

Once this is done, you can use the advanced search function to search for messages with attachments larger than 500kb or 1mb or whatever option you may choose.

This will result in the list of emails that meet the search criteria. You have the options to  right click and do the following :

• delete those emails
• delete only the attachments but keep the basic emails individually
• save attachments locally
• delete mails individually

Although this article is to free up gmail space, this is one good way to download attachments for a particulr project, all at one time, without individually finding and downloading files.

I hope that this will help resolve the space problem within Gmail.

Finally, if you want to download all the message or all messages in a particular folder, you can do it by choosing ‘Account > Account Backup’ option.