My Gmail storage was almost full, so I cleaned it up instead of upgrading to Google One

My Gmail storage was almost full, and I had no idea how it happened. I don’t keep thousands of unread emails, and I regularly clear out spam. Still, the warning kept popping up.

That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t the number of emails: it was what was inside them. Large attachments, old threads I never cleaned up, and years of forgotten files were occupying space.

Instead of upgrading to Google One, I decided to clean up my inbox. Here’s what I did, and what made the biggest difference.