A while back I was warned that unless I deleted some of my data I would soon run out of memory space. So I reduced it from almost 15G (the limit) to less than 1G. Nonetheless I was soon notified that unless I bought more memory my account would stop receiving emails. So if course, like a fool, I bought more memory.
And now despite both efforts to comply, my main 15+ year old email has been shut down. And I’ve been unable to figure out how to fix it.
Anyone else been through this?
If the problem is your storage this is the website to check:
https://one.google.com/storage
It’s a little confusing because the storage is not just Gmail, it’s for everything Google. So if you have an android phone for example, your backups of photos count toward the limit.
If it’s Gmail taking up all the room still, make sure you actually delete the mail from trash. Normally I think it auto-deletes trashed mail after 30 days but you can also do it manually.
~Max
Yeah, when I cleared out my mother’s gmail account, I had to empty the trash as well to recover the space. There are ways to look for large attachments in Gmail and, I think, in Drive (including Photos) that might help identify problems.
ETA: But, if you already bought more space, I have no idea what’s up.
How do I empty the trash? I’ve given up
Click on the Trash label on the left to bring up the Trash tab. Then click the little square below “From” to select all the items in Trash. You should then get a “Delete Forever” button
Gmail claims it empties the trash every 30 days, but I haven’t ever seen it do so.
Thank you.
But when I do that it says my trash is empty.
Update: thanks for all your help, but nothing worked.
I finally just said Phuket and bought more storage. NOW it works 
Scroll all the way to the bottom of your inbox and you should see a usage message like this:
Click on the box and it will take you to a screen which shows where your space is being used. That’s also the link https://one.google.com/storage from earlier. It could be that the space is being used in google drive or something. If you can clear out junk files, you could get back below the free level and not have to keep paying.
I’m having a similar issue. one_dot_google_dot_com tells me I’m maxxed out. I delete a bunch of files & get below the limit & the next morning I’m maxxed out again. My phone is set to not backup photos & I might get a couple of no attachment emails in that timeframe (IOW, small emails). Where does it keep finding more stuff?
Is it a case of I’m way over the limit but they only display 15gb & it only refreshes every so often so it looks like I’m under the limit until the next refresh?
I deleted a boatload of stuff on Friday. There’s some note about it may take a little bit to update your new totals but when I last looked, it looked like I still had 15.5GB (out of 15GB). Since I’ve had a couple of Pixels over a number of years, there was some deal way back when that certain backups wouldn’t count against your limit but I don’t remember all of the details anymore or even if they’ve stopped that, meaning that everything counts against my limit now.
I don’t know how I could have > 100% of my limit, especially after deleting stuff. When I looked at my photos[dot]google[dot]com page earlier it told me I had 2.6MB remaining. I got an email earlier today that told me I was 98% full (14.7 GB) but when I just refreshed photos[dot]google[dot]com it again states I’m out of storage. I have turned off photos on my phone backuping up so there shouldn’t be any recent ones but I did manage to find a couple (but not nearly all) from last week in the cloud.
Does anyone know how google calculates data as I appear to be getting different amounts from different places at different times.
Separately, I can only seem to sort it by largest photos first. On my phone I have separate directories/albums. I’d either want to delete by album or by date as I don’t know & can’t control the size of photos (I can choose quality but after that, I have no say in how large/small they are). They just all appear in photos[dot]google[dot]com in one big bucket. If I go into ‘Explore’ they have separate buckets that they’ve chose to put photos in based upon AI & all of those captcha images we’ve collectively done over the past few years. Not only are they not 100% right but it’s not my filing system so I don’t necessarily know which ‘bucket’ to look in to find a photos to delete
Does anyone know how/if I can sort them in a more useful manner, based upone either date or the folder it was in on my phone.
Despite my phone settings stating I’m not backing up photos & despite a message from Google that I have [Thousands] of photos on my phone that aren’t backed up (they are backed up another way) & I could lose them when I go into photos.google.com I see most, but not all, of the photos that I’ve taken on my phone. Why are they going there (& counting against my storage) & how do I get them to stop? If backup is off why should they leave my phone?
On my phone, the setting that controls that isn’t a phone setting; it’s a setting in the Google Photos app.
I never use Google Photos app. I looked there & just disabled it.
Any clue why, if it was enabled, my phone told me I had thousands of unbacked-up pictures if they really were backed-up?
I have no idea. Obviously a disconnect between the Google settings app (I think) that complained you had pictures not backed up and the Photos app which was doing it.
FWIW, I trust the overall settings less than apps which have a specific role in an activity. I think in this case the Photos app was updated at some time in the last few years to do this independently of the system settings but the system settings weren’t adjusted.
Of course, you have to know that an app has been given responsibility for a behavior, which is hard if it’s an app you don’t use or care about.
No, it periodically deletes messages that have been in the trash for more than 30 days. If you’re regularly deleting messages, it’s rare that you’d see the trash empty.
The exact banner text:
No, in my work-related trash at this very moment there’s an Amazon delivery update from August, 2018; a Amazon shipping notice from 2018; two professional newsletters from 2019. None were deleted within the last year or so because I don’t delete that account’s trash in case I turn out to need a document I’ve removed.