Old Gmail accounts often show low storage warnings. Google wants users to buy one of its paid storage plans. But paying for more cloud storage doesn’t make sense when you are already subscribed to Microsoft 365, which gives 1TB of storage.
According to MakeUseOf, there’s a way to free up 15GB without deleting any emails. All that’s needed is a new Gmail account and POP forwarding to move all old emails to a separate archive. This keeps old emails safe and gives space for another decade.
Gmail has built-in tools to clean up inboxes. Users can use the Manage Subscriptions feature to unsubscribe from newsletters they don’t read anymore. But if organization hasn’t been maintained from the start, finding important emails among thousands of newsletters and promotional messages is difficult. Something useful might get accidentally deleted during cleanup.
Moving old emails to a new account solves the storage problem
Google offers storage upgrades through Google One starting at $1.99 per month for 100GB. But paying just for email storage doesn’t make sense unless extra space is also needed for Drive files and Photos. Moving old emails to a secondary account frees up storage on the primary account while keeping everything safe.
The setup uses POP protocol to let one email account fetch messages from another. POP gets enabled on the old account, a new archive account gets created, and it pulls everything over. The new account connects repeatedly, copies all messages, and can delete them from the original inbox once fetched. Gmail continues to add helpful features, and users looking to improve their email writing quality can benefit from recent updates.
Before making any changes, create a backup of emails using Google Takeout. Go to Google Takeout, select Gmail, and download the archive to a computer or external drive. This gives a safety net if something goes wrong.
An app-specific password is needed for the old Gmail account. Google’s security settings often block POP access with regular passwords. Go to Google App password, create a one-time app password, and copy the 16-digit code. Make sure two-factor authentication is set up for the email account.
Start by enabling POP in the old Gmail account. Open Settings, click See all settings, and go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Enable POP for all mail. Under When messages are accessed with POP, choose delete Gmail’s copy if the old inbox should be cleared after transfer.
Switch to the new archive account, open Settings, go to Accounts and Import, and click Add an email account. Enter the old Gmail address and choose Import emails from my other account (POP3). Enter the app password created earlier, set the port to 995, and tick Always use a secure connection (SSL). Enable Label incoming messages and Archive incoming messages. Click Add Account to start the transfer.
Gmail will start pulling in all messages from the old account automatically. For large inboxes, this can take hours or even days. An account with around 50,000 messages took about a day and a half to fully transfer.
Once the transfer completes, go back to the old account and empty the Trash to free up storage space. Those interested in upcoming Gmail features users requested should keep an eye on Google’s announcements.
This process doesn’t move everything. Drafts and Spam folders aren’t included in the POP transfer. If there are important emails in Drafts, they need to be forwarded manually. The transfer can take a while for large inboxes. Tens of thousands of emails might need a couple of days to fully migrate. Delete the app password once done. Sign into the archive account at least once every two years because Google deletes inactive accounts after two years of no activity.
Published: Jan 12, 2026 05:45 pm