Out of Gmail storage? Reclaim space by moving emails to a new account

This trick will free up most of your Gmail storage.

- JARED NEWMAN

Many years ago, Google promised that you’d never have to worry about running out of Gmail storage. That was before the company stopped expanding Gmail’s free storage space in 2013 and gave everyone a flat 15GB to use across all Google services. Hitting Gmail’s storage limit has started to feel inevitable as a result. You may even run out of space even faster now that Google has stopped offering unlimited space for Google Photos (fave.co/3LZLBjG). If you’re still backing up your smartphone photos with Google, those uploads will eat into your Gmail storage space as well.

Fortunately, there’s a way to free up a large amount of Gmail storage without deleting any emails:

1. Set up a secondary Gmail account for the sole purpose of hosting old emails.

2. Duplicate emails from the main Gmail account to the secondary one.

3. Remove the duplicated emails from the main Gmail account.

Admittedly, this elaborate scheme—which I refer to as “Operation Free Gmail”—is not for the faint of heart, as it does have one notable downside: You’ll no longer be able to access your entire message history through a single inbox. Instead, you’ll have to load the secondary account whenever you want to search through older emails.

Still, I performed this operation a couple of years ago and it’s rare that I’ve needed to load that secondary inbox at all. In the meantime, I’ve saved about $50 on cloud storage costs. If you’d like to join me in getting offthe Gmail payment treadmill, here’s what you need to do:

SET UP A SECONDARY GMAIL ACCOUNT