Recovering GMAIL Storage - purging old or large emails to recover storage space

Easiest way to free up space in Gmail is to run some filtered searches and look for old or large emails and delete them.

Click on this symbol in the right side of the search bar in Gmail 

You could search for all emails over a certain size and then target the largest emails first. In this example, I'm looking for all emails over 10MB, when I click search - I will get a list of everything meeting that criteria - and can select and delete what I no longer need. 

You could also choose to not use the size option and instead opt for just checking the box to see all messages with attachments, or add a combination of settings to narrow your search even further. 

Select and delete the results as you wish in the resulting search pages to clean out the data. 

To finalize the purge and regain the space immediately you must then go into your Trash and select all the items in that location and do a final delete, otherwise they will remain in there for 30 days before they remove themselves