Finding out the size of a Gmail Draft

This blog is inspired by a question from the Gmail Help Community where the user had posted asking how to estimate the size of a Gmail Draft.

Daily users of Gmail would know that Gmail doesn't display either the size of individual messages or drafts and it would be a nice thing if they did so that the users would know how close they are to the 25 MB message size limit. But until that day arrives, how should we approach handling this question?

Gmail search always had size, larger, and smaller operators and we are going to use them. We might not get the exact size, but we can get a fairly close approximate value. Let's see how!

We have created a set of three drafts. Two fairly similar and one slightly smaller.

The Gmail search bar is located above the messages. So, we click on the downward arrow that's to the right of the bar and focus on the few fields that are towards the bottom of the search definition screen, namely Size and Search. 

The Size parameter allows us to specify the approximate size of a message or draft in terms of larger or smaller than specified MB, KB, or Bytes. 

The Search parameter allows us to restrict our search query within a selected system or user-defined Label.

Here we attempt to figure out the approximate size of the smallest draft (Lorem Ipsum 3). So we select Size less than 5 KB, Search in Drafts as is shown below and click on the blue Search button.

The search definition is shown as in:drafts smaller:5K and underneath it, all three drafts are displayed. 

So, we need a lower value. This time, we select Size less than 3 KB, keep Search in Drafts and click the blue Search button.

And Voila! we can now see the smallest of the drafts, Lorem Ipsum 3, in the search result, giving us a reasonably accurate estimate of its size.

To complete our tests, we try with in:drafts smaller:2K and in:drafts smaller:1K with the following results

showing that the smaller draft, Lorem Ipsum 3, is between 1 - 2 KB.

For drafts with attachments, we just make sure we check the Has attachment checkbox in the search definition screen and add in the file size of the attachment in the size field and multiply it by 1.33 to get the approximate message size.

For example, if we add an image of approximately 1.4 MB in size to the draft Lorem Ipsum 3, it would mean that our previous search of in:drafts smaller:3K which showed the Lorem Ipsum 3 draft, will now show zero matching results.

Since an attachment of approximately 1.4 MB will inflate the message size to around 1860K, we run a search using that figure in:drafts has: attachment smaller:1860K.

We then run a final search using a slightly lower value in:drafts has: attachment smaller:1850K, but it fails to show any matching result, giving us the approximate size of the draft between 1850-1860 KB. 

In conclusion, the search queries are kept simple to better explain the process. In real-life scenarios, searches would work better by entering other values such as recipient names, using relevant keywords, subject titles, and Date within to accurately identify the draft. One can also try out values in MB or KB or even in Bytes for a more accurate estimation of the draft size.