You Don’t Have to Pay for More Gmail Storage: How to Get 15 GB Back for Free

Your Gmail storage is almost full, or worse, it’s already full. What can you do?

If you’ve reached your free storage limit of 15 GB, you probably have thousands of unread messages. The idea of ​​cleaning out your Gmail inbox can fill you with dread. But before you start paying for extra storage, read on: we’ll show you how to get your account back to inbox zero while keeping all your old email.

All you have to do is create a second Gmail account to store all your current messages. There’s no limit to the number of free Google accounts you can own, which means you can set one up as a dedicated archive account and then transfer all your old emails to it.

Transferring your Gmail messages is also a good strategy if you have a school or business Gmail account that you don’t have permanent access to. Most universities and companies will deactivate your account once you are no longer a student or employee. So if you want to view your old messages and files, you need to transfer them to a personal account before you lose access.

Completing the entire process of transferring your Gmail messages to a new account does not take long at long, but it will depend on how many messages you have. We’ll guide 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).

To learn more about Gmail, read about the new AI summaries or how to use emoji reactions.

How Much Data Can You Store on Gmail?

Fifteen gigabytes of free storage may sound like a lot if you create a Gmail account, but it fills up quickly. For starters, the 15GB isn’t just used for email: it also includes the files you have stored in your Google Drive and Google Photos.

If you regularly send or receive messages that contain large files, such as videos, or if you find yourself uploading a lot of photos and videos to Google Photos, it won’t be long before you see the “Account storage is full” notification. ” notification. This means that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails using this account, so you’ll want to do something as soon as possible.

The fastest solution is to upgrade to a Google One account. Even if you opt for the cheapest plan — 100 GB for $20 per year — you’re still paying money to store old emails that you might not even need anymore.

If you don’t want to buy more storage space, you can always delete your old emails. You can get a surprising amount of storage space back by putting large files in the trash. Gmail makes it easy to identify and delete files by size. Still, that option may seem annoying; Maybe you don’t feel like spending hours poring over correspondence from a decade or more ago and deciding which memories to keep and which to get rid of forever.

There’s always the option to download large files to your desktop before deleting them from your Google account, but at some point you’ll probably run into the same problem with your local files and need to manage the storage space on your device.

This brings us to our “nuclear option:” Transfer all your emails to a new Gmail account.

How to transfer your Gmail messages to a new email account

Before you start the Gmail transfer process, we recommend that you backup your emails. You can do this by downloading your emails to your computer or an external hard drive. You can delete the backup if you wish after you’ve finished transferring the emails to your new account, but it’s always a good idea to keep an extra copy locally.

To backup your Gmail messages, visit Google Takeout. Using our test Gmail account with about 75,000 messages, we got a download of Google Takeout in about 2 hours.

Once you’ve saved a copy of your emails, you’re ready to transfer them. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Start by logging into your original Gmail account, click the gear icon in the top right corner and click View all settings.

2. Select the POP/IMAP forwarding tab and then select the option Enable POP for all email (POP stands for Post Office Protocol).

3. Below you will find various options When messages are opened with POP. To automatically delete the emails from your original account after the transfer, select delete the copy from Gmail.

4. Select Save changes.

Now it’s time to create your new account and transfer all your messages there:

If you haven’t already done so, create yours brand new Gmail account without inbox — we call this your archive account.

1. Log into your new archive account, click the gear icon at the top and select View all settings.

2. Select the Accounts and importing tab at the top and then select Add an email account next to Check email from other accounts.

3. In the pop-up window, enter the name of your original Gmail account. Select Next.

4. Select Import emails from my other account (POP3)Andselect Next again.

5. Enter the password of your original Gmail account. You may also need to create a password for the Google app (see note below).

6. Select 995 under Haven.

7. Check these 3 boxes: Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving email, Label incoming messages, Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)

8. Select Add account.

You will probably need to create a Google app password to transfer Gmail messages

We tested this Gmail message transfer process twice and both times the default password for the Gmail accounts didn’t work. After some research, we discovered that we needed to create a temporary “app password” to sync the accounts.

Google app passwords are 16-digit passcodes created to give “less secure” apps or devices access to your Google Account. They work exactly like your Google password.

If your regular Google password doesn’t work for syncing Gmail accounts, go to to create an app password. Simply create a name for the password (we used ‘Bulk Email Transfer’) and then click the Create button. You will get a pop-up window with your new 16-digit passcode.

Once you’ve created the app password, go back to step 6 of the instructions above and use that new app password instead of your usual password.

Important: Google only displays your app password once. Once you create it, you can’t ask to watch it again. So make sure you write it down or otherwise record it after it’s created.

Google’s own Help Center states that “app passwords are not recommended and in most cases are not necessary.” So once you are done transferring your Gmail messages, we recommend that you remove your app password.

What happens after my Gmail accounts sync?

Once you’ve successfully linked your new Gmail archive account to your original account, your emails should transfer automatically. The process can take several hours or days depending on the number of emails you have.

In our test account with about 75,000 messages, we found that it took Gmail about two full days to transfer them all from the original account to the new archived email account.

Important: After you transfer your Gmail messages to your archived email account, your original Gmail account will place all these messages in the Trash folder, which you will have to empty manually. Removing those 75,000 messages from the trash took about an hour.

Before transferring Gmail messages, our test account used just over 12 GB, or 80%, of Google’s free 15 GB. After the transfer, the account used only 0.66 GB, of which 0.06 GB came from Gmail.

Which Gmail messages are not transferred?

We found that Gmail transferred all our messages except two categories: Drafts and Spam.

You have to manually decide what to do with your drafts. Spam messages are automatically deleted every 30 days, so you can let Gmail handle this, or after transferring your email, go to the Spam folder yourself and delete or forward those messages.

Once all your emails have been imported into your new account, you can start enjoying the Inbox Zero experience. You have revived your original account.

At this point, there are two final steps: you want to stop the automatic transfer process so you can continue using your original account, and you want to delete that app password if you need to create one.

1. Log in to your new account, go to your Institutions and select View all settings.

2. Select the Accounts and importing tab and then select to delete for your original account (under Check email from other accounts.)

3. When prompted Confirm deleting the email accountselect OK.

If you had to create a Google app password and now want to delete it, go back to and click the trash can icon next to the password you created.

Congratulations, you’re done.

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 use your archive account to send email regularly, you can still keep the account active by logging in at least once every two years.