When you create a Google account, you also get some free online Cloud storage. Cloud storage is a reliable and secure place to store documents, images, videos, and any other files, and you can access them from anywhere. Each Google Account comes with 15 GB of free storage, enough to store about 15 hours of high-quality video or thousands of high-quality images. This storage is shared among all the Google applications you use, including Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail.
If you store large files in Google Drive (usually videos, app backups, zip files, miscellaneous binaries), back up your phone’s images and videos to your Google Drive Photos, or frequently sending or receiving emails with large attachments, the free space in your Google storage can quickly fill up.
Photos and videos backed up using “Storage Saver Quality” (formerly “High Quality”) will not take up any of your Google storage space when Google Photos is launched. Starting June 1, 2021, backing up photos and videos of any quality from your device to Google Photos will use your Google storage—you can learn more about it in Google’s announcement.
In this blog post, we’ll first list the various basic options for recovering Google Storage, then we’ll walk you through a few simple steps on how to delete emails attachments while keeping the email intact.
Once your Google Account starts to run out of storage, you’ll start seeing messages like “You are 93% used such as notifications. You need storage space to upload files, save photos, and send and receive emails. ” To see how much storage space is left, you can open the Google One overview page. There, you’ll see a breakdown of all the Google apps you’re using.
While you can purchase more storage, there are a few basic options for restoring some of your existing Google storage:
In Google Photos, you can go to the quota management page, delete large or blurry photos and videos, or add Original quality photos and videos are converted to save quality for storage. In Gmail, you can use a search query such as “has:attachment large:10M
” (will find all emails with attachments larger than 10MB), then permanently delete the found emails to recover some space. However, don’t rush to delete your emails – in the section below, we’ll show you a way to delete or shrink email attachments that can restore most of your used storage space. 
instead of deleting the entire email, you can delete Gmail attachments without deleting the email itself. This way, you can keep valuable information in your email (text) while freeing up your Google storage space. You can even back up email attachments before removing them from your emails.
Gmail does not have this feature. Fortunately, we created a web application called Unattach to address this use case. It relies on Gmail’s official API for its functionality and is verified by Google, which means all its communications are secure and your private data remains private – you can read about this in its concise privacy policy More information on the topic.
We created a test email with a photo of the Mona Lisa. In Gmail’s web interface, an email looks like this:
As we saw above, pictures are inline attachments (sometimes called inline attachments), which means that the picture is displayed as part of the body of the email. The image we are using is a JPEG file named “mona-lisa.jpg” of size 1.3 MB.
We now go to https://unattach.app/ and press “Start”. Here, we log into Unattach with the Google account of the email we want to update. Once logged in, we pressed the “Sign in to Gmail” button – this would give the app permission to update our email. (This permission can be revoked at any time in your Google Account permissions.)
After logging in, Unattach will show you two ways to find your email. The first is a basic search that only returns emails larger than X MB where X is 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 , 25 or 50. This is convenient because it allows us to quickly find all the large emails. Note that Gmail allows email attachments up to 25 MB in size.
There is also advanced search, which allows us to enter any valid Gmail query. A Gmail query is the text you typically enter into the search field in the Gmail web interface. Check out the search operators you can use in Gmail. Unattach will display the exact same query results as the Gmail web interface.
We enter the search query “ with: Attachment Subject: “Mona Lisa Painting” ” to find our test email. Then we select the email (by ticking the box to the left of it), and enable the “Delete Attachments” option.
When we click on “Process Selected Emails”, the application downloads the email’s attachment to the download directory, and Delete email attachments. Email labels and “received date” are preserved, which means updated emails appear in exactly the same place as before.
From a technical point of view, the app removes inserting a new email (with no attachments) into your Gmail and then deletes the original email (with attached email). We will discuss the latter part in detail later.
Unattach indicates that the email attachment has been removed:
If we are now in Gmail’s web interface again (we can open the email by clicking on its subject in Unattach) , we can confirm that the attachment has been removed:
From the above screenshot we As you can see, Unattach has also added information about the change. This is optional and can be disabled in the application’s advanced options.
Also we can see the message “1 deleted message in this conversation. View message or delete permanently.“at the bottom. By default, Unattach puts original emails (emails with attachments) into Gmail’s trash. This allows us to easily undo whatever the application does.
As long as the original email is in Bin, no Google storage will be freed. Gmail will automatically and permanently delete the original email after 30 days in the trash. We can also empty the Bin manually, which will free up Google storage space immediately.
If we don’t want to wait 30 days or empty the Bin manually, we can tell Unattach to permanently delete the original email instead of putting it in the trash. This can be configured in the application’s advanced options.
The Unattach app also supports shrinking image attachments. If we tell Unattach to shrink rather than delete the attachment in the above Mona Lisa email, it will show that it has reduced the email size by 90%. This is because it reduces the resolution and quality of the attached JPEG image, reducing its size from 1.3 MB to 129 KB.
In this case, Unattach shows that the email attachment is shrunk:
If we now view the email in Gmail’s web viewer, it looks Same as the original mail, only with lower image quality:
This method allows us to greatly reduce the size of emails with image attachments. We can also configure the target resolution and quality of the image. Most popular image extensions are supported: apng, avif, bmp ), gif, jfif, jpg, jpeg, pjp , pjpeg, png and webp . In this blog post we show how to use Unattach to remove Or reduce the attachment size while keeping the email intact. The same app can be used to process multiple emails at once, allowing you to easily recover large amounts of Google storage. Try Unattach for free!
