I have hundreds of thousands of unopened emails since I have had my Gmail account since 2008. I realized I needed to clear up my inbox when I began receiving the dreaded “Account storage is full” warning. However, the idea of having to decide which texts to delete and which to preserve overwhelmed me.
I got a better idea just as I was about to give up and start paying for more Gmail storage. I discovered that I could restore 15GB of free storage while retaining all of my previous emails, and it would not cost me a dime.
To keep all of my current communications, I just needed to set up a second Gmail account. I could create a dedicated archive account and move all of my old emails to it since there is no limit on the amount of free Google accounts you can have.
If you have a work or school Gmail account that you won’t be able to access indefinitely, transferring your mails is also an excellent tactic. If you want to read your previous messages and files, you will need to transfer them to a personal account before you lose access, since most companies and colleges will deactivate your account once you are no longer a student or employee.
It doesn’t take long to finish moving all of your Gmail messages to a new account, but how long it takes depends depend on how many messages you have. I’ll take you through the easy process of moving your emails from your old account to a new one, making sure to backup all of your data first.
How much data does Gmail allow you to store?
When you create a Gmail account, fifteen megabytes of free storage can seem like a lot, but it rapidly fills up. The 15GB is utilized for more than just email, to begin with. It also contains the things that you have stored in Google Drive and Google Photos.
The “Account storage is full” notice will appear soon if you send or receive messages that include big items, including films, on a regular basis or if you upload a lot of images and videos to your Google Photos. You should take immediate action since this implies that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails using this account.
Getting a Google One account is the easiest fix. You will still have to pay for the storage of old emails that you may no longer require, even if you choose for the cheapest plan ($20/year for 100GB).
You may always remove your old emails if you don’t want to purchase more storage. By throwing huge files in the trash, you may recover a surprisingly substantial amount of storage space. You can easily find and remove files by size using Gmail. That choice, however, may sound tiresome; maybe you don’t want to spend hours sorting through letters from ten or more years ago, choosing which memories to save and which to discard forever.
Large files may always be downloaded to your desktop before being removed from your Google account, but eventually you’ll most likely have the same problem with your local files and need to control the amount of storage space on your computer.
We now have our “nuclear option:” moving all of your emails to a another Gmail account.
How to move your Gmail correspondence to a different email address
I advise you to backup your emails before beginning the Gmail migration procedure. You may do this by downloading your emails to an external hard drive or your PC. After you’ve finished moving the emails to your new account, you may remove the backup if you’d like, although it’s always a good idea to keep a backup copy locally.
Go to Google Takeout to backup your Gmail messages. I received a download from Google Takeout in around two hours using my test Gmail account, which had over 75,000 mails.
You may start moving your emails after you’ve saved a duplicate of them. The actions you must do are as follows:
1. To begin, sign in to your original Gmail account, choose “See all settings” by selecting the “gear” symbol in the upper right corner.
2. Choose the Forwarding POP/IMAP tab, and under the Enable POP for all mail (POP is an acronym for Post Office Protocol) option, click.
3. Under “When messages are accessed with POP,” you’ll see a number of settings. Choose “delete Gmail’s copy” to have the emails from your old account deleted automatically after the transfer.
4. Click “Save Changes.”
The next step is to register for a new account and move all of your communications there:
Create a brand-new, inbox-zero Gmail account (which we’ll refer to as your archive account) if you haven’t already.
1. Sign in to your newly created archive account, then choose See all settings by clicking the gear icon at the top.
2. Choose Add a mail account next to Check mail from other accounts after selecting the Accounts and Import option at the top.
3. Type the name of your first Gmail account in the pop-up box. Click Next.
4. Choose Import emails from my other POP3 account, then click Next once again.
5. Type in your Gmail account’s original password. Additionally, you may need to generate a password for the Google app (see note below).
6. Under Port, choose 995.
7. Check out these three boxes: When retrieving mail, always utilize a secure connection (SSL). Incoming communications should be labeled and archived (skipping the inbox).
8. Click “Add Account.”
To transfer Gmail messages, you’ll most likely need to setup a Google app password.
The normal password for the Gmail accounts did not work on either of the two occasions I attempted this Gmail message transfer method. I found that in order to sync the accounts, I would have to make a temporary “app password” after doing some research.
Google app passwords are 16-digit passcodes designed to provide access to your Google account via “less secure” applications or devices. They function in the same way as your Google password.
After creating the app password, go back to step 6 of the previous instructions and substitute the new password for your regular one.
Important: Your app password will only be shown once by Google. You can’t request to view it again after you’ve generated it, so be sure you write it down or otherwise document it.
According to Google’s Help Center, “app passwords aren’t recommended and are unnecessary in most cases.” Therefore, I advise removing your app password once you’ve finished moving your Gmail messages.
After syncing my Gmail accounts, what happens?
Your emails should start moving automatically as soon as you’ve successfully connected your new Gmail archive account to your old one. Depending on how many emails you have, the procedure might take a few hours or days.
It took Gmail around two full days to move all of the messages from the old account to the new archived mail account in my test account, which had roughly 75,000 messages.
Important: Your original Gmail account will save all of your messages in the Trash folder, which you will need to manually clear after moving them to your preserved mail account. It took around an hour to remove those 75,000 texts from the trash.
My test account was consuming little over 12GB, or 80%, of Google’s free 15GB before I started moving Gmail messages. The account was only consuming 0.66GB after the move, with 0.06GB coming from Gmail.
Which Gmail mails are not going to be moved?
All of my mails were transmitted via Gmail, with the exception of two categories: drafts and spam.
You will have to manually determine how to handle your drafts. Every 30 days, spam messages are automatically removed, so you may either let Gmail take care of that or, after moving your mail, go into the Spam folder and either delete or forward those items.
Experience inbox zero once all of your emails have been moved to your new account. You’ve breathed fresh life into your first account.
There are now two last actions to take: In order to keep using your original account, you need stop the automated transfer procedure. If you have to create an app password, you should also remove it.
1. Sign in to your new account, then choose See all settings under Settings.
2. Click on the Accounts and Import tab. Then, under Check mail from other accounts, choose delete for your original account.
3. Choose OK when asked to confirm the deletion of the mail account.
Well done, you’re done.
Last but not least, accounts that have not been used for more than two years will be deleted by Google. Therefore, after transferring all of your old emails, be careful not to dismiss them entirely. You may keep your archive account alive by logging in at least once every two years, even if you don’t intend to use it often for email correspondence.