It finally happened: After years of accumulating messages in my Gmail account, I used up my 15GB of free storage. I’d had my account since 2008, and I didn’t want to spend hours sifting through those ancient messages, deciding which ones to keep or delete. I thought my only other option was to pay for more storage.
Luckily, I didn’t have to: I found a way to clear out massive amounts of storage in minutes, and I didn’t lose a single important email in the process.
All I had to do was create a second Gmail account to store all of my current messages. There’s no restriction on the number of free Google accounts you can own, which means I could set one up as a dedicated archive account and then transfer all of my old emails to it.
Transferring your Gmail messages is also a great strategy if you have a school or business Gmail account that you won’t be able to access permanently. Most universities and businesses will deactivate your account once you’re no longer a student or employee, so if you want to view your old messages and files, you’ll have to port them to a personal account before you lose access.
Completing the whole process of transferring your Gmail messages to a new account doesn’t take too long but it will depend on just how many messages you have. I’ll walk you through the simple process of transferring your emails from your old account to a new one (including the important step of backing everything up first).
For more about Gmail, learn about its new AI summaries or how to use emoji reactions.
The quickest solution is to upgrade to a Google One account. Even if you choose the least expensive plan — 100GB for $20 a year — you’ll still end up paying money to store old emails that you might not even need anymore.
If you don’t want to buy more storage, you can always delete your old emails. You can get back a surprising amount of storage space by putting large files in the trash. Gmail makes it easy for you to identify and delete files by size. Even so, that option might seem tedious; maybe you don’t want to spend hours sifting through correspondence from a decade or more ago, deciding which memories to keep and which to get rid of forever.
Once you’ve saved a copy of your emails, you’re ready to begin transferring them. Here are the steps you need to take:
1. Start by logging into your original Gmail account, clicking the “gear” icon in the top right and clicking See all settings.
2. Select the Forwarding POP/IMAP tab and then select the option Enable POP for all mail (POP stands for Post Office Protocol).
3. You’ll have several options under When messages are accessed with POP. To automatically delete the emails from your original account after the transfer, select delete Gmail’s copy.
If you haven’t already done so, create your brand new, inbox-zero Gmail account — we’ll call this your archive account.
1. Login to your new archive account, click the gear icon at the top and select See all settings.
2. Select the Accounts and Import tab at the top, then select Add a mail account next to Check mail from other accounts.
Once you’ve created the app password, return to step 6 of the instructions above and use that new app password instead of your usual password.
Before transferring Gmail messages, my test account was using a little more than 12GB, or 80%, of Google’s free 15GB. After transferring, the account was only using 0.66GB, of which 0.06GB was from Gmail.
What Gmail messages won’t be transferred?
I found that Gmail transferred all of my messages except for two categories — Drafts and Spam.
You’ll need to decide what to do with your Drafts manually. Spam messages are automatically deleted every 30 days so you can let Gmail handle that or go into the Spam folder yourself after transferring your mail and delete or forward those messages.
Once all of your emails have been imported to your new account, enjoy the experience of inbox zero. You’ve given your original account a new lease on life.
At this point, there are two last steps: You’ll want to stop the automatic transfer process so that you can continue using your original account and you’ll want to delete that app password if you had to make one.
1. Login to your new account, go into your Settings and select See all settings.
2. Select the Accounts and Import tab, and then select delete for your original account (under Check mail from other accounts.)
3. When prompted to Confirm delete mail account, select OK.
If you had to create a Google app password and want to delete it now, go back to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and click the trashcan icon next to the password you created.
Congrats, you’re finished.
One important final note: Google will delete accounts that have been inactive for more than two years. So make sure you don’t completely ignore all your old emails after transferring them. If you don’t plan to regularly use your archive account to send email, you can still keep the account active by signing in at least once every two years.
Source: CNET.
Leave a Reply