The "To Keep Up" Wiki

Maybe your account is getting too close to filling and you want to search and delete messages smartly.
Note that if you delete them, they're not removed from your gmail space until you empty the trash. So the sequence of actions could be:

1. Search for large emails, those from certain addresses, etc, and delete all of them.
2. Empty trash.

Examples

Suggestions from a thread on/about 20may2021. The wiki's author, Steve, is trying things out. Here's his status;

• 23may2021 I am trying out Horcrux right now and will update this with my findings.
• I'll be trying Thunderbird next.

Depending on the size of the mailbox, you may be able to accomplish this all with just drag-n-drop, but there are some powerful apps for Mac OS that support this kind of task, for example:

FWIW, there are a lot of reasons one might want to do a bulk download/archive of an email account, the most basic being the security of having a local backup copy. Others may just want to escape Google. And for people with super large email accounts (> 2 million saved emails), it becomes increasingly important to shunt older email into secondary storage just to keep an email client from collapsing under the load.

–Glenn P. Parker

I successfully downloaded 15GB of gmail (everything through the end of 2020) with these instructions:
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-export-your-emails-from-gmail-as-mbox-files-1171881
It went smoothly, and I can download more as I go along, and it should stay all in order.

I also successfully tried out the mail client claws-mail, with which I can read and search my now-downloaded mbox files.
https://www.claws-mail.org
As far as I know you can also send mail using claws-mail, though that's not how I'm planning to use it.

I created an account with a different mail provider.
Once I get myself all the way off of gmail, I can send and receive mail on that account and stay under the tiny quota by routinely (weekly?) downloading received mail into mbox files on my own computer, reading/searching these archives with claws-mail.

–J Tang

I use https://takeout.google.com/ for all Google data downloads, including email. It's pretty straightforward and helps conserve my inbox space.

–Ethan Kiczek

I use Thunderbird on my Mac but it’s available for Linux and Windows. It may not be the most user-friendly? But I’ve been able to keep and save emails and move them from one account to another (dragging and dropping) without issue.
I should add that Thunderbird is free and it downloads my emails to my computer. So, for example, I have an old work email that I sometimes want to look at for reference and I can without any issue.

–Adam Schwartz

Your gmail account is using close to all of its space. You want to make more room in your gmail account. You have some options.

1. Delete messages.
   1. By size. Search for “size:5m” and delete them, the ones that are over 5MB in size.
   2. Spam. Delete your spam messages. (maybe: “in:spam older_than:7d” to access ones older than 7 days to delete 'em)
   3. Trash. Empty your trash.
   4. By some other criteria. Maybe messages older than 1 year (“older_than:1y”) and be sure to delete them from Trash to free up the space.
   5. Buy space from Google.
   6. Or maybe there is another way.

There is another way. I've just found this today (20210812) and I'm still trying it out. Here's what you do, and this list is preliminary and from memory, I'll update it after I do it again.

• Create a second gmail account. Suppose your main account is “main@gmail.com” that is using up all its allowed space, and you create a second one called “second@gmail.com”
• Use Chrome browser. This is the only one that has the needed extension.
• In Chrome, install the: “Multi Email Forward by cloudHQ” extension from the Chrome Web Store.
  • You will need to allow it to have full access to your gmail account.
  • There may be more setup needed.
• Once installed, go to your main gmail account. Decide which message(s) to forward to your second account
  • Maybe set up a filter that puts all messages 5MB or larger into a folder called something meaningful like BIGGIES and these are the ones to move.
  • Setting up a folder holding the messages will make it easier to do the following steps.
• Go to the BIGGIES folder
• Select all messages (or a subset to try)
• Click on the Forwarding icon (it's between the Delete and the Mark-as-Read/Unread buttons, it's called Multi Email Forward.
• Forward selected emails individually …
• Dialog comes up, “Forward N email conversations to (enter email address)”. This would be second@gmail.com
• Click away from where you enter the second email address, and “Forward Emails”.
• Dialog comes up saying the messages have begun forwarding.

The transfer will happen in the background and it may take some time.

• The messages are forwarded; they show up in your Sent folder. You should delete them there
  • You can identify them by date (when you did the forwarding) and by the TO address being second@gmail.com.
• The messages are not deleted from your main account. You may want to delete these after you are comfortable with the messages being forwarded.

• The messages forwarded have a FROM of your main address
• The messages all show as Fwd:
• The date/time of the messages in the list of messages is the date/time you forwarded them, not the original send date/time.
• Each message is prepended with “Forwarded using cloudHQ's free email forwarding tool” with a link to the software

• You can forward messages from Main to Second, and safely delete them from Main, to free space there. All while being able to access them on Second account.

• You get a Gmail Security Alert in your MAIN account every time you start the cloudHQ transfer.

Suppose

• You want the date/time to remain the same for message in Second as it was in Main
• You don't want the “cloudHQ” message in the forwarded messages
• You want more options

Then you need to purchase a subscription from the cloudHQ people. As of this writing it's $14.99/month. It would be nice if they offered different pricing for corporation use and personal use. But they don't appear to.