As you probably know, Google recently announced unified storage plans for Gmail, Drive and Google+ photos.

Gmail users are allotted 15GBs of storage while Google Apps users receive 30GBs. This is great because instead of managing storage across multiple products, users just need to worry about their entire Google account.

As you approach your storage limit you can always opt to purchase more, but until then you may look for ways to maximize storage for your entire account. One of the best ways to maximize storage is to make sure data isn’t double counted in Gmail and Google Drive.

For example, a lot of people like to add their Gmail attachments to Google Drive. This is great because if you receive photos from friends and family you can use Google Drive to store all of them in one place. After you’ve added those photos to Drive, the storage will actually be double counted, taking up some valuable space.

To identify messages that are taking up a lot of space in Gmail, use the search operator:

size:10mb

And of course, you can replace the 10 to reflect messages of varying size.