Monday, October 4, 2010

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Cleaning My Inbox

I confess. I am an email hoarder.

I opened my Gmail account in 2007, and I have kept emails in it from as early as 2007, many even being newsletters to which I am no longer subscribed.  Some emails are so obsolete that I don't remember even getting them, or why I'd want to keep them.

I was looking at the bottom of my Gmail screen yesterday, and not that I don't have enough space in my Gmail account, but I noticed that I was using about 10% (around 800MB) of my allotted space. screen
This was my inbox this morning, after I'd deleted about I had already deleted about 1000 (yes, that is correct) emails from it.  I had been patting myself on the back about that one, but the space issue still was there. 
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Now why would 153 messages take up 800MB of space??

Well, they don't. Most of these 153 messages had no attachments at all.  So I started reasoning.  One reason for my expanding account is that I do a lot of freelance editing that involves receiving large PDF files.  Another space-eater are pictures. Many of them I have kept in my Gmail account and not moved to my hard drive yet.  But even all those files didn't seem to add up to 800MB.

I started hunting.  I found this little link in the left sidebar under my personally-created labels.
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I discovered another reason for my huge amount of accrued space is an automatic feature called "Archive" that I think Gmail did when I converted several of my messages into Mozilla Thunderbird.  Well, I won't go into how or why it happened.  I'll admit it, I'm geeky, but I don't even want to think about how or why it happened right now.

When I clicked on the "All Mail" link, I was shocked to see the number of emails on the top panel change from this
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to THIS.
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Yikes.  That will take a while.  I deleted 1000+ emails yesterday, and it took me about 30-45 minutes, but I figure if I can do that many every day, I'll be down to under 1000 TOTAL emails in no time.

After that I will tackle my Mozilla Thunderbird inbox, and my hard drive will thank me for it.

1 comment:

Aleta said...

I used to be an email hoarder too. But I go through waves of hoarding and then suddenly it's spring cleaning. Now, I'm more prone to spring cleaning.

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