How Do I Find and Remove High-Size Emails in Gmail?
Here’s how to delete large emails on the web in detail:
- Sign into Gmail on the web.
- Click the Show Search Options button on the right of the Search box at the top.
- Next to Size, choose greater than and enter the size as MB, KB, or Bytes.
- Click Search.
- Mark the Select checkbox on the top left.
- To select more than the first 50 or 100 messages (by default), click the Select all messages that match this search link.
- Click Delete in the toolbar.
💡 Note: If you want to sort Gmail by size to see the largest emails before deleting them, learn about the limitations and your options.
To find and remove sizable emails in the Gmail mobile app, tap the search bar, then select the “Has any attachment” filter to show messages that likely take up more space. From the results, choose the messages you want to remove and tap the trash icon.
Delete Large Emails With Search Operators
Along with the Search Options in Gmail on the web, you can use search operators to find storage-heavy messages. And since there isn’t a Search Options feature in the mobile app, you can search operators there as well.
Search For High-Size Emails with Operators
Enter one of the following search operators and include the size you seek (the below amounts are in megabytes):
- size:5M
- larger:10M
- smaller:15M
You can also search for emails within a specific size range by combining search operators. For example, to find messages larger than 5 MB and smaller than 10 MB, you’d enter larger:5M smaller:10M.
Select and Delete the Large Emails
Once you receive the results, do the following to remove them all:
Web: Mark the Select checkbox, click the Select all messages that match this search link (if applicable), and choose Delete.
Mobile: Mark the Select all checkbox at the top, scroll to the bottom to load additional messages (if necessary), tap Select all again, and choose the Delete in the toolbar.
Easily Remove Large Emails in Gmail with Clean Email
As you may have noticed, deleting large mail through the native Gmail interface can be a cumbersome task, requiring numerous actions and repeated confirmations of your decisions.
What if there was a way to remove sizable messages in bulk, quickly, and with just a few clicks? The Clean Email app offers you this convenience:
- Sort emails by size to easily spot your largest messages.
- Remove storage-heavy emails with attachments in one click.
- Free storage quickly by deleting thousands of messages at once.
After selecting multiple messages, you can easily send them to the trash or delete them permanently on the web or your mobile device.
Additionally, you can set Auto Clean rules to automatically delete old sizable emails, so you don't have to manually clean them every time.
Clean Email is free to try for any IMAP service provider. The app is committed to the security and privacy of its users, and it doesn’t keep, sell, or analyze user data for any marketing purposes.
Troubleshooting Large Email Deletion in Gmail
When you spend time cleaning up Gmail storage by removing your largest messages, it can be frustrating running into problems. Here are a few of the most common questions.
Want to permanently remove large emails?
Once you delete the high-size messages you find in Gmail, they are sent to the Trash where they remain recoverable for 30 days. If you want to permanently delete an email before it’s automatically removed, open the Trash, select the message, and click Delete Forever at the top.
Note that you will no longer be able to restore the email once you remove it from the Trash!
Trying to delete only email attachments?
While you can find and clean up high-size emails with attachments in Gmail, the delete action removes both the email and its attachment. There isn’t currently a native way to only delete attachments in Gmail.
Deleting large emails in Gmail not freeing up storage?
Your Google storage consists of Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive. If you aren’t seeing a big change in available storage after deleting emails taking up a lot of space in Gmail, check the amounts that the other Google services are using.
Visit the Google Storage page for your account and sign in if necessary. You’ll then see a breakdown of the storage used by service.
