Tips to free up Gmail space without losing old emails

If you use Gmail regularly for work, it is inevitable that your storage capacity will be full. However, instead of paying for more storage, you can free up 15GB without deleting any emails.

All you need is a new Gmail account and POP forwarding to send all your old emails into a separate archive. This way, you can still keep your old email and create new space for emails to use for many more years.

Gmail has a number of built-in tools to help clean up your inbox, and you can use the Manage Subscriptions feature to quickly unsubscribe from newsletters that are no longer needed. But if you’re not in the habit of managing your inbox from the ground up, finding a few hundred important emails among thousands of newsletters, receipts, and promotional messages will be difficult. Even if you take the time to organize everything, you might accidentally delete something useful during the cleaning process.

Google offers storage upgrades through Google One, starting at $1.99 per month for 100GB. But not everyone can afford or need to use this upgrade. Moving your old emails to a secondary account solves both problems. You free up storage space on your main account while keeping everything in case you need it later.

This setup uses the POP protocol to allow one email account to retrieve messages from another account. You enable POP on the old account, create a new storage account, and tell it to copy everything. The new account will connect multiple times, copying all messages and optionally deleting them from the original inbox once downloaded. Gmail automatically handles complex tasks.

Prepare to transfer emails

Before making any changes, create an email backup using Google Takeout. Go to Google Takeout, select Gmail, and download the backup to your computer or external hard drive. This gives you a layer of protection if something goes wrong during the transfer process.

You’ll also need to create an app-specific password for your old Gmail account. Google’s security settings typically block POP access with a regular password. Go to Google App Passwords, create a one-time app password with a name similar to Email Transfer, and copy the 16-digit code. Please keep this code for use in the next steps. If you get an error, make sure you’ve set up two-factor authentication for your email account and try again.

Creating an application-specific password for your email account is an important step in this process. Without it, you won’t be able to complete the transfer because Google’s servers will refuse to authenticate with a regular password.

If you don’t have a secondary Gmail account, create one now. This will be a dedicated archive account where all your old emails will be stored.

Email transfer

Let’s start by Enable POP in old Gmail account. Open Settingsclick See all settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Turn on POP for all mailthen in section When messages are accessed with POPselect delete Gmail’s copy if you want your old inbox to be wiped clean after the move. Save the changes you just made.

Now let’s switch to the new hosting account. Open Settings and go to Accounts and Import > click Add an email account edge Check mail from other accounts. Enter the old Gmail address and select Import emails from my other account (POP3).

On the next screen, enter the application password you created earlier, set the port to 995 and check Always use a secure connection (SSL). At the same time, turn on Label incoming messages so you can easily identify transferred messages and Archive incoming messages so they skip your inbox and go straight to it All Mail. Click Add Account to start transferring. Google will send an email with a confirmation link to your email address, so open your Gmail account and click on that link.

Gmail will start automatically pulling in all the messages from your old account. For large inboxes, this process can take hours or even days.

Once the transfer is complete, go back to your old account and empty the trash to free up storage space. Then go back to your storage account settings and remove the mail import link in the section Check mail from other accounts to stop further automatic synchronization.

Some limitations of how to free up Gmail space without losing old emails

This process doesn’t transfer everything. Drafts and spam are not included in POP transfers, so if you have important emails in progress that are in drafts, you need to forward or copy them manually.

The transfer process can take quite a while if the amount of data is large. Tens of thousands of emails can take several days to migrate completely. Even emptying the Trash afterward can take an hour. Plan for this if you’re working with Gmail that accumulates emails over the years.

Don’t forget to delete the generated app password once completed. Leaving that password active is an unnecessary security risk. And perhaps most importantly, log in to your hosting account at least once every two years. Google will delete inactive accounts after two years of inactivity, which will erase your entire email history.