Ideally 7.5+ Gb of the ever increasing storage space would be more than enough for most if the users having a Gmail account. Still a few of the remaining clan of busy people can still run out of this space. If you receive tons of emails every day and most of them come in as forwarded ones with subjects like ‘cute pictures’, ‘true miracles’ and ‘unbelievable facts’, then you probably don’t even care to read them through and you either mark them as read or you delete them all in a go. All these emails have loads of pictures which take up space from your Gmail account. You might occasionally receive a few that has attachments running in megabytes and a few others which you probably won’t need anytime in future. I have something over 20K emails in my inbox and all of them consume a portion of the 4.5Gb of the space that I’ve already consumed. Most of the space is take my emails with attachments and I’m sure you’d probably find over 75% of those would be having no worth any more.


So what’s the next step after you reach a critical threshold on your Gmail account space? Now you have an option to either buy a pro Gmail account or to sweep through your Gmail account to clean up the big dogpile. If you are a frugal at buying such services, then do you plan to spend hours gleaning through your emails? Well, there’s something to help you out with this step. FindBigMail is a free service introduced by a few bright engineers that helps you categorize emails into 2 buckets – Small, Big and Really Big emails. What it does is that it categorizes emails by size and creates a label for each such group. These labels can then be click to access the emails that fall within that group. According the statistics, on an average over 70% of your emails by count will ideally fall under the small/average categories and 5% emails by count wil be under the ultra-large jumbo sized emails.

Here’s how to set things up:-

1. Visit FindBigMail.com
2. Enter your Gmail address in the text box that appears on the page and click on the button that says ‘Click Here’.
3. FindBigMail will now access your Gmail emails. Authentication is done over OAuth, so you need not worry much about the security of your account. To read more about OAuth, click here
4. Grant access to FindBigMial when Gmail asks you to do so.
5. FindBigMail will now notify you via email when its done scanning and bucketing your emails. It can take anything between 5-30 minutes depending upon the load their servers are being crushed under and how big your email drive is
6. After you get the email from FindBigMail, you would be able to see a few categories listed. Visit these to find the categorized emails.
7. Oh.. and there’s one more magic that can now be done. You can search for large emails and specify attachment types as well. Example searching for label:big-mail has:attachment ZIP, will list all the emails that fall in the big email bucket and have a zip file attached to them.