Search Gmail messages by Size using the undocumented “size” operator

Wondering which email messages are eating up all the Gigabytes of space that you have in your Gmail mailbox? While there exist Google Gmail Scripts that let you discover all the space-hogging email attachments, you don’t really need them anymore.

Gmail supports an undocumented “size” search operator that you can use to quickly find all the big emails in the mailbox whose size exceeds a particular threshold. The search syntax is:

size:[size in bytes]

To give a real example, a Gmail search query like size:5242880 will list all big emails who size is 5 MB or greater while size:10485760 will list email messages that are bigger than 10 MB.

You may specify the size in MB as well which makes it a lot easier. For instance, size:5MB (or say size:5M) will find all Gmail messages that are 5 MB or greater in size.

Combine the size search operator in Gmail with has:attachment and filename:ext operator and you have all the email messages that have attachments that are of a particular file type.

Gmail Size Search for Large Attachments

size:5mb has:attachment - All emails larger than 5 MB containing file attachments.

size:10mb has:attachment filename:pdf - Emails larger than 10 MB PDF attachments.

In addition to size, you can use search operators like larger, larger_than, smaller and smaller_than to find files of any particular size. A combination of these size search operators is possible too. For instance, the following Gmail search query will find all emails with attachment sizes between 5 MB and 8 MB.

larger_than:5m smaller_than:8M

Once you have spotted the large emails attachments that are taking too much space, apply the #googleDrive label to directly save those attachments to Google Drive before deleting them from your Gmail mailbox.