Do you have an overflowing Gmail inbox at the beginning of the year? You may need to start going through your hundreds of unread messages to determine what you can remove if you are unable to get fresh ones. Additionally, you might want to quit up and start paying for additional storage if the thought of clearing up your Gmail inbox makes you feel anxious. The good news is that you may keep all of your previous emails and still receive 15GB of free storage.
To keep all of your current communications, you just need to set up a second Gmail account. You may create a dedicated archive account because there is no limit on the quantity of free Google accounts you can have.
and then move all of your previous emails to it.
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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. You must transfer your old messages and files to a personal account before you lose access because the majority of colleges and companies will deactivate your account once you are no longer enrolled or employed.
It doesn’t take long to move all of your Gmail messages to a new account, but how long it takes will depend on how many messages you have. We’ll walk you through the simple process of transferring your emails from your old account to a
new one (with the crucial step of first backing everything up).
Learn how to utilize emoji reactions or Gmail’s new AI summaries for more information.
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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. To begin with, email isn’t the only usage of the 15GB: It also contains the files you have stored in Google Photos and Drive.
If you upload a lot of images and videos to your Google Photos account or send or receive messages that contain huge files, such films, on a regular basis, then it
The “Account storage is full” warning will appear shortly. You should take immediate action since this implies that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails using this account.
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Getting a Google One account is the easiest fix. You will still have to pay to keep old emails that you may no longer require, even if you choose 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 with Gmail.
That choice, however, may sound tiresome; perhaps 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 can 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
We advise backing up your emails before beginning the Gmail transfer procedure. You’re capable of doing this.
by saving 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, but it’s always a good idea to keep a backup copy locally.
Go to Google Takeout to backup your Gmail messages. We received a download from Google Takeout in around two hours using our test Gmail account, which had over 75,000 mails.
You may start moving your emails once 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. Click on the POP/IMAP Forwarding tab.
Then choose the “Enable POP for all mail” option (POP is an acronym for Post Office Protocol).
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 following the transfer.
4. Click “Save Changes.”
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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 original Gmail account in the pop-up box. Click Next.
4. Choose to import emails from my other POP3 account, then click Next once again.
5. Type in your Gmail account’s original password. Additionally, you might 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.”
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To transfer Gmail messages, you’ll most likely need to setup a Google app password.
The normal password for the Gmail accounts did not function in both of our tests of this Gmail message transfer method. After doing some investigation, we came to the conclusion
that a temporary “app password” would have to be made in order to sync the accounts.
Google app passwords are 16-digit passcodes designed to grant access to your Google account through “less secure” apps or devices. They function in the same way as your Google password.
To create an app password if your standard Google password isn’t working for synchronizing Gmail accounts, go to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords. Just give the password a name (we chose “Transfer Bulk Email”) and click the “Create” button. Your new 16-digit passcode will appear in a pop-up window.
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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. Once you have made it, you are unable to
After it has been generated, make sure you write it down or otherwise document it and ask to see it again.
According to Google’s Help Center, “app passwords aren’t recommended and are unnecessary in most cases.” Therefore, we advise removing your app password after 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.
Gmail took around two full days to move all of the mails from the original account to the new archived mail in our test account, which had over 75,000 messages.
account.
Important: After transferring your Gmail messages to your archived mail account, your original Gmail account will place all those messages in the Trash folder, which you’ll need to empty manually. Clearing out those 75,000 messages from the Trash took about an hour.
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Before transferring Gmail messages, our 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?
We found that Gmail transferred all of our 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
thing, or after moving your mail, go into the Spam folder and either delete or forward those mails.
Experience inbox zero once all of your emails have been moved to your new account. You’ve breathed new life into your first account.
There are two last procedures at this stage: if you have to create an app password, you should remove it and stop the automated transfer process so you may use your original account.
1. Sign in to your new account, then choose See all settings under Settings.
2. Choose “Delete” for your original account (under “Check mail from other accounts”) after selecting the Accounts and Import tab.
3. When asked to
Click OK to confirm the deletion of the mail account.
Go back to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and click the trashcan button next to the password you generated if you had to make one and would like to remove it right away.
Well done, you’re finished.
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 frequently for email correspondence.