An Ultimate Guide: Do Archived Emails Take Up Space in Gmail

• User Case: Deleting Vs. Archiving
• What Are Archived Emails?
• Do Archived Emails Take Up Space in Gmail?
• When Is It Best to Archive an Email?
• Bonus Tip: How to Increase Gmail Storage Space Free
• In the End

User Case: Deleting Vs. Archiving

“Hello! Sorry if this question is already answered somewhere deep in this sub but I don’t have time to dig deep. Are 5+ or whatever years of archiving emails taking up space on my Gmail? I am nearly out of space and I have no idea what is taking up space, I have nothing saved there and they are already asking me to purchase more space.... Very grateful that there is a sub for EVERYTHING on Reddit :)”

What Are Archived Emails?

Let's begin by gaining a clear understanding of Gmail archiving in relation to storage space. Archiving an email in Gmail involves moving it from your inbox to the "All Mail" folder, effectively removing it from your primary inbox. This process helps tidy up your inbox while keeping important messages readily available whenever necessary.

In Gmail, archiving an email is easy. Just choose the email you want to archive and click on the archive button, which looks like a folder with a down arrow icon. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut "E" while viewing the email. To find your archived emails, you can search for them or go to the "All Mail" label.

Do Archived Emails Take Up Space in Gmail?

In essence, archiving emails in Gmail doesn't directly use up your storage space. Instead, Gmail considers the size of attachments and non-textual content when allocating storage. By employing this method, Gmail ensures that archiving remains an effective and practical way to manage your emails.

Nevertheless, it's worth mentioning that if your archived emails include sizable attachments, those attachments will still take up storage space. Hence, if you're mindful of storage usage, it's advisable to periodically examine and delete unnecessary attachments, even from your archived emails.

Then, you can see the difference between deleting emails and archiving emails. If you delete emails, they will be removed.

When Is It Best to Archive an Email?

Archiving proves to be the superior option in most cases when it comes to managing processed emails. There exist numerous justifications for preserving emails, and archiving effectively eliminates them from your inbox. 

Everyone desires to avoid a perpetually overflowing inbox. By archiving unnecessary emails, you can effectively declutter your inbox and enhance its manageability. There are instances where you must retain specific emails for compliance purposes. Archiving serves as a valuable tool to help you monitor and safeguard these emails, preventing accidental deletion.

At the same time, archiving emails also serves the purpose of securely storing sensitive information and attachments. When you come across an email containing data that you wish to retain but prefer not to keep in your inbox, archiving it once again proves to be an excellent solution.

Bonus Tip: How to Increase Gmail Storage Space Free

As mentioned before, archived emails also take up storage space. So, if you don’t delete them, they will eat up your Gmail storage space quickly. To better manage your emails, how to increase Gmail storage space free can be such a problem. Thankfully, there are some walkarounds. For instance, you can sign up for a new Google account to get another 15GB of free storage space.

Or, you can delete those emails that you don’t need anymore. If all those emails are important, you can backup them to your PC, hard drives, or cloud drives. If you want to do it easily and quickly, MultCloud can be your best choice. It is known for its cloud storage management that provides users with an integrated platform to work with multiple cloud drives.

In addition to normal cloud management, MultCloud is launching its new function, helping you manage emails from multiple mailboxes, such as Gmail, Outlook, and more. With the help of MultCloud, you are allowed to download emails, along with attachments, to PDFs on your PC. Also, you can migrate emails to cloud drives that MultCloud supports directly without downloading.

After backing up those emails to your computer, hard drive or cloud drives, you can free up storage space on Gmail. In this way, your storage space can be used efficiently. The good thing is that MultCloud supports more than 30 cloud drives on the market, so you can save emails to those clouds and collaborate with friends and colleagues with ease.

Now, you can read the following part to learn how to backup Gmail emails to your PC via the smartest service – MultCloud:

Step 1: Create an account via your preferred email. Alternatively, continue with your Google/Facebook account.

Step 2: Log in to your MultCloud account. Then go to the Add Email option on the left. Next, hit the Gmail icon to add your credentials and give MultCloud permission.

Step 3: Go to Gmail, multi-select the emails you want to back up, and hit the Download tab on the upper side taskbar.

A pop-up window will ask you to choose Downloading Settings. You can make your own settings based on your requirements. After all is finished, hit the OK option.

By doing so, MultCloud will download selected emails PDFs on your computer. You can choose to move them to an external hard drive. Also, you can backup emails to Dropbox, MEGA, OneDrive for Business, Dropbox Business, Amazon S3, etc.

In the End

So, do archived emails take up space in Gmail? After reading the whole text, you now know it does eat up the space. To better manage your emails, you can archive your emails. And when you find your Gmail storage space is insufficient, you can take advantage of MultCloud to backup those important emails to local space or cloud drives.