[ghaff]

I was noticing just the other day that my Gmail storage is creeping upward towards its limit. I'm sure it could stand some cleaning out although I'm not sure how much that will affect the storage used.

It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with getting off with the free tier of storage.

I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for storage on a number of services we use.

[kyrra]

https://www.google.com/settings/storage can be at least a little helpful to see storage usage across Google's main properties.

[ghaff]

That was actually quite useful. I apparently have 4GB of pics on Google Photo that I didn't know about or use.

[GistNoesis]

What I usually do is search mails according to specific criterion, put a label on all of them so that they are easily downloadable from https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (you can sub-select only the specified label there)

Then a few hours later I receive the download link and download them. Then search for the label and delete them all to release the space.

Don't use the existing archive functionality, because you won't be able to delete them all ; by doing a "in:archive" search the div which propose to really select them all won't pop-up (feature or dark-pattern I don't know).

[jvagner]

I was surprised at how difficult it was to make "Delete" a top-level, default UI option even in the latest iOS version of Mail.

It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients.

I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS, which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.

[ghaff]

I've gotten pretty lazy about deleting emails. But, the space aside, GBs of random stuff do make it harder to search for older emails and docs, especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for.

[jchw]

The opposite problem also exists: I am a bit frustrated trying to archive mail in Yandex Mail on iOS, which actually pushes you to delete and hides archive behind a couple layers. Not sure why, to be honest.

[digitalsushi]

I did too, and so I tried to find a way to back my gmail up. With their rate limiting, I'm not convinced my gmail is something I can actually retrieve. It's 2/3 full and too heavy to pick up, the handles break off. And with 200k emails from 1999 (I think I have emails before gmail in there), I'm in trouble.