As an alumnus, my university provided a free gmail account administered by the IT department. This account included an unlimited Drive account as well as other Google workspace features. Unfortunately, Google is implementing new security that is forcing the university to limit features to alumni. No calendar. And email limited to 5GB storage (no upgrades allowed). I have had the account over 10 years and I am only at 2.5GB; but, I wondered what if I needed to do if I needed bring my usage down.
My first thought was to delete attachments. But there is no easy way to delete attachments but retain the original email.
However I found a nifty app: unattach
Unattach removes attachments from the original email and can even leave a note as to what files were removed. (Effectively it copies the email and pastes a new email without the attachment.) This app is free for 30 or less emails a month.
It has a great search function and one click functionality to view the selected emails to be sure you want to remove the attachments.
Anyway, I was able to remove 750MB of attachments in a few minutes… and it turned out only 30 emails had large attachments. I am down to about 1.65GB. My biggest offenders are jpegs that I have saved on my PC, but I still wanted the email message.