Clearing Space in Gmail

I was reaching 95% of my Gmail quota when Gmail displays a message at the top of my window asking me to either delete some of my emails or upgrade the account. I was tempted to upgrade my account and I was nearly a click away in Google Checkout before I decided to see how much space I could retrieve by deleting some of my attachments.

But Gmail doesn't have allow you to sort by attachments. Luckily, thanks to the World Wide Web, I found that you could list all attachments via the command has:attachment in the Search box in your Gmail.

This will list all attachments, in-coming and out-going.

But since I had over 2000 emails with attachments and I wanted to keep some of them, going through each mail would be a tedious process.

Then I came across this command :  has:attachment from:me label:sent

This command will list all emails with attachment sent by you which is in your Sent box. Now this is something that I can get rid off immediately. So, I just selected all of them and thrashed then. A quick peek at my quota and its still at 95%. I went into Trash and emptied it and voila, I am now down to 56%.

Thanks to the World Wide Web and the power of sharing, I just saved myself some cash. But dont get me wrong, spending a mere $20 for 6GB worth of space is worth every single cent and I would if I need it.