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.
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. 

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.

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

to THIS.

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.