I definitely hold on to my emails indefinitely as well. Every email gets archived, just in case, and I refer to them all the time, so I know it's not a waste of space

Doug, how is she filling up so much space? What kind of email is she getting? I ask, because I NEVER delete my email, I've had GMail since 2005, and I've only used 9.1GB. I happen to pay for Drive storage for other stuff anyway, but still, you have to be a VERY busy emailer to need that much storage space. I support a top realtor who runs a 15-person real estate group, and she's using about 40GB, but she's dealing with dozens of clients at a time, running her business, sending PDFs back and forth, etc.

Just squinting at the image you included, I bet you could get a couple hundred MB back simply by deleting all the NYTimes.com emails. Go through and unsubscribe from stuff like that, then delete all the emails you got from those sources. That'll help immensely. And certainly wipe out absolutely everything in those Social and Promotions categories. I can't see how many emails are in those, but it sure looks like the unread count is in the hundreds.