Yes, You Really CAN Run Out of Space in Your Gmail Account [Images]

by Kristin Dziadul on January 14, 2011

Here at Backupify, we have to do some crazy things to test the limits of our software.  Often it requires us pushing cloud services to their own limits to see what happens.  As a result of this testing, we recently found out that yes, you can run out of space in Gmail, and here is what the warning message looks like:

“You have run out of space for your Gmail account. You will not be able to send or receive any emails until you delete some items.”

gmail out of storage

This Gmail account deliberately used for testing actually reached the seemingly endless storage limit, using 7532 MB (99%) of his 7533 MB – approximately one million email messages.

The assumption that your Gmail account will never reach its maximum capacity has been tested and we’ve concluded that yes,  you can in fact run out of space on Gmail. The full screenshot is below.

gmail storage limit

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  • Anonymous

    I always wondered about that! I use 75% of my Gmail account storage, so this may happen to me soon.

  • Anonymous

    Dude that makes a lot of sense dude.

    http://www.being-anon.it.tc

  • http://www.technotheory.com Jared Goralnick

    I’ve never seen that!

    I was worried when you tagged AwayFind in your article that you were using this to stress-test us! Great to see how the running out of space behavior works with Gmail…now good luck reading and acting on each and every message in there to clear out your inbox…

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  • Jack

    What a disappointing article. I got here by clicking on your ad on techmeme, thinking that maybe you were offering a service for people to easily backup and clear a GMail account to make space for new messages.
    Take this as a feature request maybe. I run out frequently since I got to send music and videos via Mail (something that appears to be only possible with GMail. Unfortunately that also gets me to the limit quire often.

  • Oem

    So, 7532MB of space can be used up by filling it with 7532MB of data? Who’d have thunk it?

  • Anonymous

    Hi Jack, we do in fact backup Gmail – and the rest of Google Apps. You can use Backupify to archive and restore this data. When you have a backup in place for Gmail, you can absolutely delete emails on Gmail if needed (it will still reside on your Backupify account) so you never have to worry about hitting your Gmail storage limit. Let me know if you have any questions, we’re happy to help!

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  • http://qip.ro Doru

    and I use backupify for my twitter account and for picasa album

  • http://polizeros.com/ Bob Morris

    Dropbox is a great way to send files back and forth. There”s no size limit, and unlike GMail, doesn’t block EXEs.

  • http://twitter.com/FindBigMail FindBigMail

    If you get to the point where your inbox is full (or close to), you can use http://www.findbigmail.com to identify the space hogging messages and delete them.