Home » Technology How-to Guides » Emails & Productivity How-to Guides

How to Sort Gmail by Size Using Gmail Search

Published July 10, 2019

4shares

On this page...

If you are running out of space, you may want to sort Gmail by size so you can delete large emails. One way you can sort Gmail by size is to use Gmail search.

Option 1: Sort by Size Using “Larger_Than” or “Size” Operators

Part of available search operators in Gmail are size, larger and smaller. These operators help you sort Gmail by size.

To sort Gmail by emails larger than a specified size, follow the steps below:

Enter the search below on the Gmail search bar.

larger_than:5mb

The search above will find all emails larger than 5mb.

To return results, click Enter key. All emails with size greater than 5mb will be returned as shown in the image below:

If you are not very techie, mb used above means MegaBytes. It is a unit used to indicate size. 1mb is approximately 1,000,000 Bytes. Effectively, the search above can be changed to larger_than:5000000. This will return the same result as seen below.

You can also search by size operator as shown below:

size:5mb

The size criteria returns emails larger than the specified size. You can specify the size in megabytes or in bytes.

Here is the result of the last search that returns emails larger than 5mb or 5000000 bytes.

If you compare the above results with that of the “larger_than:5mb” search, you notice that the same set of emails were returned.

Option 2: Sort Gmail Using “Smaller_Than” or “Size” Operators

There may be circumstances when you may want to find emails smaller than a specified size. In this instance you will use the smaller_than search operator.

Here is how you can find emails smaller than 5mb.

Enter the search criteria below into the Gmail search bar:

smaller_than:5mb

Next, press Enter to return results.

You can achieve the same result as above by using the size operator. But this time, enter a small value for size.

To find emails with size smaller than 1mb, use the search below :

size:1mb

The search above returns emails with size 1mb and below.

sort gmail by size - search using size operator

Option 3: Sort Gmail by Size and Date

You can sort Gmail by size and date by combining the search criteria we discussed above and Gmail search by date. This is particularly useful if you want to delete older emails larger than a particular size.

In the example below, I demonstrate how to find all emails older than 4 years and larger than 10mb.

On the Gmail search enter the following:

size:10mb older_than:4y

To return results press Enter key. Here is what it looks like in Gmail.

If you wish to delete old emails taking up space in your Gmail account, after sorting Gmail by size as discussed above, you can select all emails using the square check box above the emails. Then click the third icon (counting from left to right) to delete the emails. See the image below.

Conclusion

Gmail does not have a built-in option to sort emails by size. The only walk-around is to search for and display emails using available size operators.

In this guide, I demonstrated how to filter Gmail emails by size using various search operators. Kindly let us know what you think about this article by responding to the “Was this page helpful?” question below.

Alternatively, you could share your experience sorting Gmail by size so other readers can benefit from it.

Was this page helpful?
Yes (1)No (3)

About the Author

Victor Ashiedu

Victor is the founder of InfoPress Media, publishers of Ilifeguides and Itechguides. With 20+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, his expertise spans Windows, Linux, and DevOps. Explore his contributions on Itechguides.com for insightful how-to guides and product reviews.