Sort Your Large Size Email Message Using Google Docs
Labels:
Gmail,
google docs
Date 5/1/2013
What do you do when your Gmail account is nearly full? You can either purchase additional storage from Google (they charge $5 per year for 20 GB) or a cheaper alternative is that you scan your Gmail mailbox for messages that contain large file attachments and delete (or forward) all the useless messages to recover precious space.
The problem is how do you find these bulky messages in your mailbox when Gmail doesn’t offer an option to sort and filter messages by size? But there’s a new option now that requires no setup and you don’t even have to grant access to your Gmail account to a third-party for analysis – this option is called Google Docs.
Sort GMail Messages by Size of Attachments
Sit back and relax as the last step may take time depending on how big your Gmail mailbox is. Also, if the program is stuck or if you accidentally close the browser tab, open the same Google sheet, choose “Scan Mailbox” again and the script will resume scanning from where it left off.
What do you do when your Gmail account is nearly full? You can either purchase additional storage from Google (they charge $5 per year for 20 GB) or a cheaper alternative is that you scan your Gmail mailbox for messages that contain large file attachments and delete (or forward) all the useless messages to recover precious space.
The problem is how do you find these bulky messages in your mailbox when Gmail doesn’t offer an option to sort and filter messages by size? But there’s a new option now that requires no setup and you don’t even have to grant access to your Gmail account to a third-party for analysis – this option is called Google Docs.
Sort GMail Messages by Size of Attachments
The idea is that your Google Docs will connect to your Gmail account and
compute the size of every message that’s present in your mailbox. If it
finds a bulky message (size > 1 MB), it will make a note of it in
the spreadsheet.
Once the sheet has a list of all the bulky message, you can sort the sheet by the Size column to
find the big ones. Or use the Filter option (the Funnel icon) to find
messages that are within a particular range (5 MB < size < 10 MB).
Click the “View” link to open the corresponding message in Gmail,
forward it to a secondary email address and delete it from the primary
Inbox to recover space.
That’s all the theory you should know, let’s now put this program into action:
- Create a copy of this sheet in your Google Docs account.
- A new Gmail Menu will appear in the sheet after about a minute. Select “Reset Canvas” from the Gmail menu to initialize your sheet.
- Accept the authorization screen and then choose Grant Access to let Google Docs access your Gmail Inbox. This is completely safe because your own Google Docs account is requesting access to your own Gmail account.
- Once the permissions have been granted, choose “Scan Mailbox” from the Gmail menu to start the scanning process.
Sit back and relax as the last step may take time depending on how big your Gmail mailbox is. Also, if the program is stuck or if you accidentally close the browser tab, open the same Google sheet, choose “Scan Mailbox” again and the script will resume scanning from where it left off.
Post a Comment