It wouldn’t surprise anyone that my 15-year-old Gmail account always has low storage warnings, with Google pushing me to buy one of its paid storage tiers. But it’s hard to justify paying for cloud storage when I already pay for a Microsoft 365 personal plan that offers 1TB of storage. And despite trying various Gmail add-ons to manage my inbox better, the storage problem remains.
Instead of paying for more storage, I found a way to free up 15GB without deleting a single email. All I needed was a fresh Gmail account and POP forwarding to move all my old emails to a separate archive. This way, I kept my old emails and made space for another decade’s worth.
How the setup works
This is the best way to deal with your old emails
You always have the option to manually delete your old emails. Gmail has some built-in tools to help clean up your inbox, and you can use the Manage Subscriptions feature to quickly unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read. But if you haven’t been disciplined with your inbox since the beginning, finding your few hundred important emails amongst thousands of newsletters, receipts, and promotional messages is a pain. Even if you take the time to sort through everything, you might end up deleting something useful that doesn’t seem important during the cleanup.
Google offers storage upgrades through Google One, starting at $1.99 per month for 100GB. But paying specifically for email storage doesn’t make sense unless you also need space for Drive files and Photos. If that were the case, you’d probably already have a subscription.
Moving your old emails to a secondary account solves both problems. You free up storage on your primary account while preserving everything in case you need to access it later.
The setup uses POP protocol to let one email account fetch messages from another. You enable POP on your old account, create a new archive account, and tell it to pull everything over. The new account connects repeatedly, copies all messages, and optionally deletes them from the original inbox once fetched. Gmail handles the heavy lifting automatically.
Preparing to transfer your emails
Get your backup and credentials ready
Before making any changes, create a backup of your emails using Google Takeout. Go to Google Takeout, select Gmail, and download your archive to your computer or an external drive. This gives you a safety net if something goes wrong during the transfer.
You’ll also need to create an app-specific password for your old Gmail account. Google’s security settings often block POP access with your regular password. Head to Google App password, create a one-time app password labeled something like Email Transfer, and copy the 16-digit code. Keep this handy for the next steps. If you run into an error, make sure you have set up two-factor authentication for your email account and try again.
Creating an app-specific password for your email account is a critical step in this process. Without this, you won’t be able to complete the transfer as Google’s server will refuse to authenticate with your regular password.
If you don’t already have a secondary Gmail account, create one now. This will be your dedicated archive account where all your old emails will live.
Transfer your emails
Let Gmail do the heavy lifting
Start by enabling POP in your old Gmail account. Open Settings, click See all settings, and go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Enable POP for all mail, then under When messages are accessed with POP, choose delete Gmail’s copy if you want the old inbox cleared after transfer. Save your changes.
Now switch to your new archive account. Open Settings, go to Accounts and Import, and click Add an email account next to Check mail from other accounts. Enter your old Gmail address and choose Import emails from my other account (POP3).
On the next screen, enter the app password you created earlier, set the port to 995, and tick Always use a secure connection (SSL). Also, enable Label incoming messages so you can easily identify transferred mail, and Archive incoming messages so they skip the inbox and go straight to All Mail. Click Add Account to start the transfer. Google will send an email with a confirmation link to your email address, so open your Gmail account and click on the link.
Gmail will now start pulling in all messages from your old account automatically. For large inboxes, this can take hours or even a couple of days. My account, with around 50,000 messages, took about a day and a half to fully transfer.
Once the transfer completes, go back to your old account and empty the Trash to free up the storage space. Then return to your archive account’s settings and delete the mail import link under Check mail from other accounts to stop any further automatic syncing.
What you need to know
The transfer has some limitations
This process doesn’t move everything. Drafts and Spam folders aren’t included in the POP transfer, so if you have important work-in-progress emails sitting in Drafts, you’ll need to forward or copy them manually. Spam auto-deletes after 30 days anyway, so that’s less of a concern.
The transfer can take a while for large inboxes. Tens of thousands of emails might need a couple of days to fully migrate. Even emptying the Trash afterward can take an hour for massive accounts. Plan for this if you’re working with years of accumulated email.
Don’t forget to delete the app password you created once you’re done. Leaving it active is an unnecessary security risk. And perhaps most importantly, sign into your archive account at least once every two years. Google deletes inactive accounts after two years of no activity, which would wipe out your entire email history.
A simple solution for Gmail’s storage problem
This method won’t work for everyone. If you need constant access to your old emails, switching between accounts is less convenient. But if your old emails just sit there taking up space, moving them to a free archive account makes more sense than paying Google monthly for storage you barely use.
I’ve had my archive running for a few months now, and I haven’t needed to dig into it once. But knowing those emails are still accessible if I ever need an old receipt or conversation is reassuring.
