GMail is widely touted as the best free email client on the web, with a clean, easy interface, and ridiculous amounts (7.6GB, and growing) of storage.

Amazingly, at the beginning of August, I found myself hovering near 94% capacity. Once that caps out, I’d need to (eep!) start deleting my old files. Imagine the prospect—e-blast letters from four and a half years ago, never to be seen again!

Surprisingly, (or rather, unsurprisingly as I’d later find) GMail makes it remarkably difficult to delete old messages and free up space.

“Sort by message size” seems like it’d be a rather intuitive function to include, and yet, it’s entirely nonexistent. Without it, one might have to delete messages individually, or by page/date, rather than simply cherry picking the bundle of emails with Adobe Creative Suite attachments and freeing up inbox space 5% at a time. You’d have to weigh reading every individual email to make sure nothing important is lost, or deleting everything (slowly) and risk losing your mom’s secret family soup recipe to the ether forever.

It’s also difficult to mass-forward your emails to a different account. I don’t have a problem removing everything from immediate reference in my primary account—as long as it’s somewhere to potentially look up later.

You can’t even explicitly bulk-delete your emails. If you’re just working off of the “Delete” button, you’ll have to go one page / 20 messages at a time. I ended up with roughly 26,000 emails, or 1,300 pages of messages in my inbox. Not an option.

Why would a program that’s famed for its ease of use make these processes so startlingly difficult? Well, duh. Buy more storage. This much is incredibly easy. (I’m fascinated, by the way, that the 1 Terabyte option is viable.)

In any event. GMail is great and all, but I’m not about to spend $5 on things. Here’s how I worked around this.

1. Start a new GMail account (I went with the handle peterselj.backup; this seemed appropriate). It may help to work out of a separate browser, so that you can stay logged in to your primary and backup accounts at the same time.
2. Go to Mail Settings in your new backup account. There’s an option for “Import Mail and Contacts.” Haha! Google caught that one too. You can’t import your mail from other GMail accounts. (In the future, feel free to skip the second half of this step).
3. Instead, while in Mail Settings, go for “Check Mail using POP3.” Fill out your junk for your primary account. This will allow Google to check all of your mail—and because it’s Google and wants to know everything in the universe about you, it’ll take the liberty to download all of your old emails too.
4. Wait a while. Again, I had 26,000 emails. The transfer didn’t happen instantly.
5. Great! peterselj.backup has everything!
6. Now, about memory dumping the primary account: Go to Mail Settings in your primary account, and head to the Filters tab. You’re going to need to create (at least) two filters, temporarily. First: make your search criteria “To: peterselj@gmail.com” (with your information instead of mine, of course). Hit “Next Step.” Then, “Delete it.” Although before you hit Create Filter, be sure to check off “Also apply to 13,000 emails below.”
7. Delete the filter created in step 6. You don’t want any new emails showing up to go directly to the trash.
8. Repeat step 6, but instead of “To: peterselj@gmail.com,” fill in “From: peterselj@gmail.com” as your filter criteria. Repeat step 7, too.
9. Repeat steps 6 and 7 again for any other email accounts with which you currently have GMail set up to send/receive emails.
10. You’re done…but wait. It still says you’re at 93% storage capacity. That’s because all your old junk was only moved to your Trash—which still counts against your storage space. This is okay. You can easily empty your entire trash immediately. Or, better yet, leave everything in your trash. Google will get around to emptying your the folder in about 30 days; meanwhile, in the transition period, everything in your trash will still be searchable. And any email threads you discover that you’d like to save on your primary account can still be recovered.
11. I don’t know, I just like having things with eleven steps. I guess, start over at step one with “peterselj.backup2@gmail.com” in another half dozen years.