In old days, when hit by dreaded mailbox size exceeded notification, in Outlook I always used to sort mails by size and remove the attachments - which used to be the only culprit in mailbox bloat.
Go through top 10-20 mails, and you are set for another year or so before you hit the mailbox limit again. Rinse and repeat.
I know it's not what you're asking for and if someone tells me one more time "why would I need to sort when I can just search?" I will probably shout something rude at them.
But, do you know about their search options? You can use "size:5MB" for example to find emails over 5MB. This is what I do when I find I need to, as you say, trim the bloat.
You can search by size in gmail in the web site. Also, you can connect any pop/imap email client and sort by whatever you want. Even if you don't want to use Thunderbird full time, spend 10 minutes once a year to get it connected and do some mailbox cleaning and you can pretty much solve this problem.
Alternatively, you can just archive off X years off mail and store it off of gmail. That way if you ever need it you can always dig it up.
I think you can use a IMAP client like Thunderbird to clean it up.
(I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in Thunderbird)
Yes you can. You can go to the "All Mail" folder, add the "Size" column to the list view (right click the columns) and then proceed to sort every email by size.
