You've got email -- and too much of it, probably. Get to inbox zero by transferring all your old messages to a new Gmail account.
Have you used up the 15GB of free storage that comes with your Gmail account? Have you tried to delete a few spammy emails or unsubscribe to those newsletters you stopped reading, but still found yourself with thousands of unread messages? Does the idea of cleaning out your Gmail inbox sound impossible? Before you start paying for extra storage, read on: there's an easy way to get your account back to inbox zero while keeping all your old email.
All you need to do is create a second Gmail account to store all of your current messages. There's no restriction on the number of free Google accounts you can own, which means you can set one up as a dedicated archive account, and then transfer all your old emails to it.
Transferring your Gmail messages is also a great strategy if you have a school or business Gmail account that you won't be able to access permanently. Most universities and businesses will deactivate your account once you are no longer a student or employee, so if you want to view your old messages and files, you'll have to port them to a personal account before you lose access.
Completing the whole process of transferring your Gmail messages to a new account doesn't take too long, but it will be dependent on just how many messages you have. We'll walk you through the simple process of transferring your emails from your old account to a new one (including the important step of backing everything up first).
For more about Gmail, learn about its new AI summaries or how to use emoji reactions.
How much data can you store on Gmail?
Fifteen gigabytes of free storage may sound like a lot when you make a Gmail account, but it gets filled up quickly. For starters, the 15GB isn't just used for email: it also includes the files you've saved in your Google Drive and Google Photos.
If you frequently send or receive messages that contain large files such as videos, or if you find yourself uploading a lot of pictures and videos to your Google Photos, then it won't be long before you'll see the "Account storage is full" notification. This means that you will no longer be able to send or receive emails on this account, so you'll want to do something ASAP.
The quickest solution is to upgrade to a Google One account. Even if you opt for the least expensive plan -- 100GB for $20/year -- you'll still end up paying money to store old emails that you might not even need anymore.
If you don't want to buy more storage, you can always delete your old emails. You can get back a surprising amount of storage space by putting large files in the trash. Gmail makes it easy for you to identify and delete files by size. Even so, that option might seem tedious; maybe you don't want to spend hours sifting through correspondence from a decade or more ago, deciding which memories to keep and which to get rid of forever.
There's always the option to download large files to your desktop before you delete them from your Google account, but at some point, you'll probably run into the same issue with your local files and have to manage the storage space on your device.
This brings us to our "nuclear option:" Transferring all your emails to a new Gmail account.
How to transfer your Gmail messages to a new email account
Before you start the Gmail transfer process, we recommend that you back up your emails. You can do this by downloading your emails either to your computer or an external hard drive. You can delete the backup after you finish transferring the emails to your new account if you like, but it's always a good idea to have an extra copy stored locally.
To back up your Gmail messages, go to Google Takeout. Using our test Gmail account that held about 75,000 messages, we got a download from Google Takeout in about 2 hours.
Once you've saved a copy of your emails, you're ready to begin transferring them. Here are the steps you need to take:
1. Start by logging into your original Gmail account, clicking the "gear" icon in the top right and clicking See all settings.
2. Select the Forwarding POP/IMAP tab, and then select the option Enable POP for all mail (POP stands for Post Office Protocol).
3. You'll have several options under When messages are accessed with POP. To automatically delete the emails from your original account after the transfer, select delete Gmail's copy.
4. Select Save Changes.
Now it's time to create your new account and transfer all your messages there:
If you haven't already done so, create your brand new, inbox-zero Gmail account -- we'll call this your archive account.
1. Login to your new archive account, click the gear icon at the top and select See all settings.
2. Select the Accounts and Import tab at the top, and then select Add a mail account next to Check mail from other accounts.
3. In the pop-up window, enter in the name of your original Gmail account. Select Next.
4. Select Import emails from my other account (POP3), andselect Next again.
5. Enter the password of your original Gmail account. You might also be required to create a Google app password (see note below).
6. Select 995 under Port.
7. Check these 3 boxes: Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail, Label incoming messages, Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)
8. Select Add Account.
