I was going to live forever through gmail, but now I'm running out of space. Tips?

July 31, 2011 6:30 PM

I was going to live forever through gmail, but now I'm running out of space. Tips?

Seriously, I know I'm a hoarder and I use gmail as a journal/storage facility with drafts of papers and documents I might need to use later. I deleted a bunch of paper drafts, but anyone got a good way to easily reduce the amount of crap I have in gmail? If you help me out this time internet I swear I'll be better.

And I'm not willing to pay $5/year. Not because of the $5/year, but it makes me anxious that one day I'll forget to pay and lose everything.

posted by treeshar to technology (7 answers total)

Why not open a second account that serves ONLY as an archive. name it something like treeshar.archive and move all the stuff that's just archive there. Use your current account for regular email purposes.
posted by stoneweaver at 6:36 PM on July 31, 2011 [3 favorites]

Maybe store the papers and documents in Google Docs?
posted by hot soup girl at 6:39 PM on July 31, 2011

1) Search for messages with attachments. Delete the ones that you don't need. An attachment can take up 100-1000x as much space as a plan ol' email message.

2) If you get any regularly-recurring newsletters/spam/things you can always safely delete, you can search on that too. Better still, create a filter and have it trash these messages immediately. You can choose to retroactively apply the filter to your inbox, which will delete the old messages. Be as specific as possible in your search terms to avoid deleting legitimate messages.

3) Stop using GMail as a journal/storage facility. There are better options for things like that.
posted by schmod at 6:42 PM on July 31, 2011

Can't you download all your current Gmail crap onto a flash drive or external hard drive, label it something like "Old Gmail backup", then start new with an empty inbox?
posted by jwmollman at 6:44 PM on July 31, 2011

I've used Find Big Mail a few times and it works exactly as described.
posted by kdern at 6:49 PM on July 31, 2011 [5 favorites]

They remind you to pay. They do know your email address, after all.
posted by mr_roboto at 7:10 PM on July 31, 2011 [7 favorites]

What's more, if you forget to pay, they don't delete your email. They hold on to it, and ask you to pay.
posted by mr_roboto at 7:18 PM on July 31, 2011