Delete or Migrate Google Apps Gmail accounts

In Gsuite (or Google Workspace as it's now called), you pay per user and we had some dormant accounts that contained emails useful enough to archive but not useful enough to keep paying for an unused user account. We deleted attachments to drastically reduce the disk size of those dormant accounts and backed them up in the following way. This was done in 2020 - the exact steps may have changed since then.

1) Identify user / inbox to be deleted

2) Turn off conversation view in that inbox so that conversations are not grouped and emails are always displayed individually. You do not want to delete a whole group of emails - it is better to work on single emails to avoid making mistakes.

3) Run this search in the inbox to be delete:

larger_than:2mb -Re -Fwd from:usertobedeleted@email.com

This will run a search returning all messages that were sent by the user you are deleting greater than 2mb in size and that aren't sent in reply to (or forwarded from) another message.

4) Scan through the messages to make sure you aren't deleting anything you would want to keep. Once you are satisfied you've got the right messages, select all (check the box to select all messages on all pages, not just the ones displayed) and delete.

5) Empty your trash folder. This account's storage space usage should now be less than it was before.

6) Once the account is sufficiently trimmed, start data migration following the instructions provided via Google Admin Console: admin.google.com

7) The migration will take 1 - 3+ days from my experience. Once it is complete you can delete the user account that was migrated without losing any emails.