Google Apps 25GB Email Storage Limit

So today I learned that when you use Google Apps (like we do at work) for Business and someone hits that 25GB limit on what's in their Mail (Gmail) account, you can't increase it.  But if you have a private (free) Gmail account you can pay to increase your mailbox size.

Seems a little backward?

So, when your boss has the problem you need to figure out what to do.

Option 1: in the short term, delete dome mail.  Start searching for

• big emails "larger:20M"
• with attachments "has:attachment"
• before a certain date  "before:2010/1/1"
• with movie attachments "filename:(mov|wmv|mpg|avi)"
• from a certain domain or a certain user "from:(report|alerts)@domainreports.com"
• you can combine them and there are a bunch of others, go here for advanced email search filters: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

Personally when I have a good search that finds a bunch of stuff I want to delete I setup a Gmail Filter into a Label that starts with an "X" like "X-mailinglists" so when I think about it I can just open up the "X" labels and start doing some cleaning.

Option 2: Google Apps Vault (have not checked out the pricing yet) it let's you archive your email so it's still searchable, the details are here:  http://support.google.com/vault/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2462365

Option 3: archive offline (you may archive messages locally in a mail client like *cough* outlook)


Option 4: get another email account and setup mail delegation (under "solutions" on this page: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1186436) but basically change name of your current account, give new account old name, delegate mail permissions so you can switch to your old account and search at any time.


Read a bunch of stuff tonight and there are a lot of people bitching about the lack of this feature.  I can add space to Google Drive but why not email?  Why can't I archive my email to Google Drive?  Excellent question, and I'm glad you asked and I plan on trying out these two Chrome extensions tomorrow to move some email data to Google Drive:

Archiver for Gmail is a script that will seamlessly analyze your inbox and move all the big attachments to your Google drive:  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archiver-for-gmail/bohfahbhaioeaildanonpalaengldgfh?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

emails2docs automatically puts emails including their attachments from your Google Gmail into your Google Docs/Drive:  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emails2docs/mokbchipfpaaoioeljkgpojddoecnbce?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

We'll see how this plays out.