To find every email with a large attachment, type has:attachment larger:10M into Gmail's search bar and press Enter. Gmail shows every email larger than 10 MB that has an attachment. Change 10M to any size you like: larger:5M finds more emails, larger:25M finds only the largest ones.

This is the fastest built-in way to see what is using up your Google storage. A few large attachments often take more space than thousands of normal emails. This guide covers the most useful variations of the search, what Gmail can't do with the results, and how to free up space.

To clean up many emails at once, we built a web app called Unattach. It runs the same searches and can remove or downsize the attachments while keeping the emails.

How the search works

The search combines two of Gmail's search operators. has:attachment keeps only emails with at least one attachment, and larger:10M keeps only emails larger than 10 megabytes. The letter M stands for megabytes, K for kilobytes, and a number without a letter represents bytes.

The operator larger: measures the whole email, which means the email body plus every attachment. Attachments are stored using Base64 encoding, which adds about a third to their size. The email body usually takes up very little space: when an email is larger than a megabyte, almost all of its size is in the attachments.

You can do the same search without remembering any operators: click the sliders icon () on the right of Gmail's search bar, set "Size" to "greater than" your chosen size, tick "Has attachment", click Search, and Gmail will create the search query. You can find the full list of operators in Gmail's search reference.

Useful variations of the search

• has:attachment larger:10M older_than:2y shows emails larger than 10 MB that are older than 2 years.
• has:attachment larger:10M filename:pdf shows large emails with PDF attachments. You can also try filename:zip, filename:mp4, or a full name like filename:report.pdf.
• has:attachment larger:10M from:me shows large emails you sent. Those attachments use up your storage too.
• has:attachment larger:5M smaller:10M finds emails between two sizes. Once you have checked every email over 10 MB, this query shows the next group.

Can you sort Gmail search results by size?

No. Gmail shows search results by date. There is no way to order them by size, so the largest email in your account doesn't appear at the top. A few things that help:

• Start with larger:25M and go through those results, then repeat with larger:10M smaller:25M, then larger:5M smaller:10M.
• Use Google's own Storage Manager, which has an "Emails with large attachments" section that sorts emails by size. The downside is that it can only delete whole emails, including the email body.
• Run the search in Unattach, which shows each email's size, sorts by size, and lets you remove or downsize attachments without removing the email body.

What to do with the emails you find

Now that you have found the large emails, there are two options, depending on how much you want to keep:

• Keep the emails, remove the attachments. Gmail can't do this itself. Unattach removes or downsizes the attachments in the emails you select. You can also back up attachments beforehand. Our guide to deleting Gmail attachments without deleting the emails shows this step by step.
• Delete the whole emails. If you don't want to keep the emails at all, run your search query in Gmail's web interface, tick the Select checkbox () at the top left, click "Select all conversations that match this search", and click the delete icon (). No tools needed, but you also lose the email bodies, not just the attachments.

Unattach follows Google's API user data policy, and your emails flow only between Gmail's servers and your browser. They never touch our servers. Unattach has over 14,000 users, many positive reviews, and a free plan.

When is the storage actually freed?

Deleted emails move to Gmail's Bin folder (called Trash in some countries), where they still take up storage for up to 30 days. To free the space immediately, open the Bin and click "Empty Bin now". Storage is shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos, so space freed in Gmail becomes available everywhere. It can sometimes take Google a few days to update the available storage.

Frequently asked questions

In short

has:attachment larger:10M shows you which emails use up your Google storage, on any device, with no extra software. However, Gmail can't delete attachments while keeping the emails. To do that, sign in to Unattach, run the same search, and remove or downsize the attachments. The free plan is enough to try it on your own inbox.