[ad_1]
I arrived at work on Monday for a discouraging warning. My Gmail inbox had reached its maximum capacity and unless I did something about it, I would not be able to send or receive e-mails.
I am usually a person of the "zero inbox" type, which means that I try to clear my inbox everyday and let my inbox be sort of a to-do list. But when I get rid of emails, I generally archive them and rarely delete them. This means that emails are always available and accessible if I have to find them, but they do not clutter up my inbox.
One of the main reasons I love Gmail is that you can archive e-mails while keeping them forever. If I really wanted to, I could go back to the e-mail exchanges between my husband and I that we sent back while we were still "just friends". I can easily find the emails I received from my accountant and my doctors. Things like tickets, receipts and itineraries are always there.
In other words, my Gmail archives are an accessible record of my life. But as I realized on Monday, there is a limit to these archives. And this limit is 15 GB.
Monday morning, I was at 14.8 GB, 99% of my limit. After that, you have to pay. The cheapest package costs $ 19.99 per year for 100 GB of disk space, which seemed unnecessary considering the amount of waste that I have in my inbox.
You can see how much of your free storage space you have used in the lower left corner of your Gmail inbox.
If you have reached your maximum and need to free up space quickly, you will want to find a way to delete the emails en masse. The best way to do this is to set some parameters in order to mass delete emails you no longer need.
Here is what I did:
1. I looked in my inbox for "promotions" emails over two years old.
Google is already doing a great job of grouping email into useful categories. The "promotions" category includes all e-mails of services such as Groupon on retailers such as J. Crew. I rarely open these emails because I get a ton, and I tell Gmail to filter them from my main inbox.
I thought I would never again need to find those promotional emails, especially those who are over two years old.
To start this search, copy and paste this text into the search field at the top of your inbox:
category: promotions, old_than: 2y
2. Click the "Select All" box, view here.
3. Click "Select all conversations matching this search."
4. Then click on the recycle bin icon.
5. Your work here is not over. You must always delete emails from your trash.
When you delete emails, Google saves them for 30 days in your trash. If you want to free up space in your Gmail account, you need to make sure to remove these emails from your trash as follows:
Removing all these emails may take a while, but once you do, you should see a large portion of your free storage return. I've deleted 40,000 emails and my storage has reached 11.68 GB.
[ad_2]
Source link