Recently I noticed that my Google Drive space was nearly full. I also noticed that Gmail was consuming a majority of the space. I could not understand why as I delete and move my emails to a local file in Outlook. Looking at this more, I found out why and spent a whole day to get my Gmail space down to zero.
Google keeps all email even if you delete it in Microsoft Outlook. This was something that I was not aware of but not surprised. The surprising part is that the space taken by the deleted emails counts against your Google Storage.
The problem I have is my security cameras send emails for alerts. Those emails include two attached images. It was these emails that were consuming most of the space. In addition to the alert emails, Gmail had emails going back ten years.
I found the article at HelloTech.com, that explained how to delete all your Gmail quickly. I proceeded with the steps in that article but found that 0 to 10,000 messages may be deleted using that method. Yes, there were several times where zero messages were deleted after waiting several minutes. I spent the rest of the day in my All Mail folder deleting messages and going to the trash to empty it. At the end of the day, I finally managed to get the space used by Gmail to zero.
I did find that deleting emails from other labels or categories using the Gmail web interface did indeed delete the email in the All Mail folder. The problem seems to be if you delete them from Outlook, it may remove the label applied to the email but does not delete the email. It looks like I may need to periodically go into Gmail’s web interface to delete the emails. This is not an ideal workflow so I will be looking to see if there are other ways to solve this issue including rolling my own application to delete emails from Gmail’s All Mail folder.
If you have any ideas on how to resolve this issue with Outlook and Gmail, please reply with a comment to let me know. If I make more progress with rolling my own solution, I will post an update to let you know including a link to any code that I develop.
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