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?
In the past, I have shared both software tools and web apps that help you quickly track the space-hogging emails in your Gmail account 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 5-10 seconds. 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 (see source code).
- 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.
Once all the mails have been analyzed, use the sort or filter options in Google Docs to find the biggest emails, apply a common label and then use bulk auto-forward to send all these messages to your secondary email address. That’s it!
Troubleshooting tips: If you get an error that says "Service invoked too many times for one day" or "Exceeded maximum execution time", you may want to wait for some time before re-running the program. These are Google Apps Script limits to prevent abuse.
This story, Sort your Gmail Messages by Size using Google Docs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 18/04/2012 under GMail, Internet.
Related posts:
- Send HTML Emails with Gmail and Google Docs
- Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs
- How to Auto-Forward Gmail Messages in Bulk [Video]
- Add Links to Google Docs Documents in your Gmail Messages
- Save your Gmail Messages in Google Docs
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