Clean up wasted space in Gmail using this awesome trick

If you've been using Gmail for a while, or have been making good use of your Google Drive, the free 15GB storage might not seem like enough. Before you decide whether to upgrade your storage, you can do a quick search to clear your Gmail account of large and unnecessary emails.

Unsurprisingly, Google's Gmail Search Features 5 Advanced Gmail Search Operators You Should Know 5 Advanced Gmail Search Operators You Should Know Gmail is a nifty webmail client with lots of amazing features. Being a Google service, one of its strengths is obviously search. And that's exactly how Google revolutionized email. In Gmail you don't really have... Read More You can search by date, recipient, keyword, and most importantly for this trick, by file size.

There are several operators you can use to search for emails by size:

• Search for specific sizes. If you want to find all 5MB emails, use Size:5m .
• Find all emails that exceed a certain size. If you want to find all emails larger than 5 MB, use Larger:5M .
• Find all emails of a given size. If you want to find all emails less than 5 MB, use Smallest:5M .
• Find all emails with attachments, which exceed a certain size. If you want to find all emails with attachments larger than 5 MB, use has the largest attachment:5M .

To see this process in action, watch the video below:

Go through those emails and decide what you want to delete, what you need to back up to an external hard drive or another cloud storage account. Remember, moving those emails to the Google Drive associated with that email account will not reduce your storage usage.

Cleaning up your Google Drive files is a bit more challenging. You can't search or sort by size, but if you use the following URL...

...you can see your entire list of files automatically sorted in order of largest first.

What tips or tricks do you use to keep your Gmail and Google Drive storage manageable? Let us know in the comments.