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I see that my Gmail app is consuming a lot of disk space because it retains many old emails. Is there any way to reduce the amount of space it consumes without clearing all of the app's data?

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  • I actually think that e-mails are downloaded not as data but rather cache.
    – SarpSTA
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 20:42
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    No, they're stored as data. When I check the size of the app in Settings, I see that its data consumption is huge, and separate from the cache.
    – Nathan Fellman
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 20:45
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    AFAIK there's a setting in the app for how many days to retain on-board. Reducing that should set some space free. But don't ask me where that setting is – I've got no GApps on my devices anymore :)
    – Izzy
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 20:55
  • Related: Make Gmail auto-delete old emails from phone
    – Firelord ♦
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 21:05

1 Answer 1

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In Gmail's menu open Settings, tap an e-mail account, and decrease the "Days of mail to sync" setting. You can also hit "Manage labels" there to stop syncing certain labels altogether if desired. Repeat for every account. Afterward, I would try manually syncing each account (pull down the message list), clearing the cache, and syncing again.

If that doesn't decrease the amount of data used then you can do some manual cleanup if you have root by removing the /data/data/com.google.android.gm/databases/mailstore.<address>.* files, which will remove all of your synced email and some settings. Most preferences will be left intact however, so it's better than completely clearing the data.

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