Gmail related problem, please help

[681038e4e5134JDoran]

My Gmail account recently went over the 15GB limit, so I deleted a lot of emails, and photos, and I am now down to 14.6GB, so I now have 0.4GB free. The problem is, I deleted six years or so worth of emails, and a lot of photos from Google Photos, so I should have more free space than this. I am trying to find out where the bulk of the 14.6GB is, and according to Gmail's oh-so-detailed site at:

https://one.google.com/storage

I am using:


Google Drive              0 GB

Gmail                 14.59 GB

Google Photos             0 GB



The problem is, I still have quite a few photos left in Google Photos (that I didn't delete, because I want to keep them), so the above figure is wrong. And the page doesn't offer a more detailed breakdown, though to be fair since the object of the page is clearly to get people to pay for more storage, why expect Google to make things easy for people who want to sort out how their free space is being used.

I can see and view my photos in Google Photos, so why does the above page insist that there are none? And how do I get Google Photos to actually tell me how many photos I have, and how much space they take up?

And since I now only have e-mails from 2018 to the present day (I have deleted the ones from 2012 to 2017 to save space, and yes, I did then empty the Gmail trash can, so they are totally deleted) then I don't believe that they come to anywhere near 14.6 GB in total.

Does anyone have any idea what can be causing this problem? And does anyone know of a contact address for Gmail, either e-mail or phone? Or even a forum for users of Gmail? I have searched avidly, but can't find any way of contacting them. Just the not too helpful site:

https://support.google.com/?hl=en

which didn't offer any helpful answers, unfortunately.

Thanks for any replies.

[681038e4e5504fox]

I'm pretty much clueless but could it be that you have some device synchronized to your Gmail account, that simply copies the files back after deleting them?

Other than that, maybe this search operator (bold) from a Google support page helps you finding large attachements:

Gmail
Permanently delete large emails

    In the Search box, type has:attachment larger:10M.

    Click Search Search.
    Note: Replace "10" with a higher number to delete larger files.
    Select the emails you don't need, then click Delete Delete.
    On the left side of the page, click Menu Menuand then Trash.
    At the top, click Empty trash now.

Permanently delete emails in Spam

    On the left, click Spam. If you don't see Spam, click More.
    At the top, click Delete all spam messages now. Or, select specific emails, then click Delete forever.

For other ways to search for email, learn about Gmail search operators.

These operators could be useful here:

Messages that have a Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, or Slides attachment or link    
has:drive
has:document
has:spreadsheet
has:presentation
has:youtube
Example: has:drive
---------
Messages from a mailing list
list:
Example: list:info@example.com
---------
Attachments with a certain name or file type    
filename:
Example: filename:pdf
Example: filename:homework.txt

[681038e4e572eNameless Voice]

Gmail space is generally taken up by one of two things:

a) attachments on your emails
b) the endless waves of quotes in long email threads.

If it's attachments, I'd suggest using Unattach - a utility that will download and remove attachments from your emails, without deleting the emails themselves.

The endless waves of quotes is harder to deal with - you need to learn to manually delete the quotes every few emails in long threads.
I had considered contributing to Unattach to add a feature to remove deep quotes, but never got around to doing so.
In fairness, it's probably fairly unusual to have email threads that long.

[681038e4e58caKolya]

You could connect with a local email client to gmail and download everything, then start deleting what you don't need online.
I regularly use Sylpheed for this as it has many useful features like sorting mails by size. And it has a portable version so you can easily move your mail archive around.