“Free” email programs from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, more likely than not, now have limits.
Google’s Gmail the most used email program, ahead of Microsoft’s Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail, could end up costing you this year. Google discontinued its policy June 1 of free photo uploads to the Google Photos app beyond the 15 gigabytes of storage it automatically allots.
But that 15 GBs includes Google Photos, the Google Drive backup service and Gmail.
Go over 15 GBs, and you’ll have to pay. Or worse, you’ll wake up in the morning to this error message from Google about your Gmail.
Tips to trim your Gmail box
1. Find out how much you’re using. Log in to your Google account, then visit the Google One site. Under the Storage heading, you’ll see how much you have stowed now.
2. Tackle the biggest items first. Google suggests typing “has:attachment larger:10M” into the search bar to find the emails with the largest attachments. Emails with videos, PDFs and large photos should show up. Download any attachments you want to keep onto your computer’s hard drive. Then select and delete the emails.
If you have thousands of emails, you’ll have to do this several times. On a personal computer, you’ll also need to go to the left side of the page, click Menu | Trash | Empty Trash Now.
3. Search by sender or more than two dozen other specifics with tips from Google’s Gmail support page. Don’t forget to click Select All in the spam folder, promotions and social tabs to get rid of those.