Gmail almost full

May 3, 2006 7:45 PM

You are currently using 2657 MB (98%) of your 2720 MB. My Gmail account is reaching its limit. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort by size. What's the smartest way to weed out the larger attachments?

I'm not averse to using a gmail application or programming API, but which do you recomend?

posted by signal to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Just out of curiosity ... HOW!?
posted by dmd at 7:48 PM on May 3, 2006

dmd: architect, big files (topography, renderings, aerial photography, etc.)
posted by signal at 7:50 PM on May 3, 2006

Just archive all on your harddrive. You could download it all via pop3 and have gmail delete it when it's downloaded.
posted by bigmusic at 8:06 PM on May 3, 2006

Better use the pop to get the mails to your PC and setting it to erase them from your gmail account

You can search for the messages with attachements and erase them
posted by zouhair at 8:09 PM on May 3, 2006

Do not want to download emails, or delete all attachments. As per the question, looking for ways to delete largest attachments.
posted by signal at 8:24 PM on May 3, 2006

If you can't do it within GMail (and it sounds like you can't what about POP to something like Thunderbird, but choose to fetch headers only and leave messages on the server until you delete them from the Tbird inbox.

Then, once you have all your message headers, sort by size, identify the largest and then either delete the messages via TBird, or use the header info to track them down in GMail and delete the attachements there.
posted by Good Brain at 8:34 PM on May 3, 2006

Connect to your Gmail acct. with Outlook Express, add a size column to the inbox pane, sort by size-descending, then go back to Gmail via web browser and search for specific messages by title to delete.

But this would only be practical if you wanted to get rid of, say, the top five largest emails. Pretty inconvenient for larger numbers. Might work for you if the distribution of attachment sizes is right.
posted by hjo3 at 8:41 PM on May 3, 2006

Woops, someone beat me to it while I had the window open.
posted by hjo3 at 8:43 PM on May 3, 2006

I could swear I'd heard someplace that you can ask gmail for more storage and they'll probably grant it, but this is probably apocryphal.
posted by evariste at 8:55 PM on May 3, 2006

In fact, it is apocryphal. I can't find anything about it anywhere.
posted by evariste at 9:11 PM on May 3, 2006

I have no understanding of programming but the following you might find as a useful explanation:

I was using a quite cool skin for g-mail and e-mailed the guy that wrote it asking if he could add in an attachment size column and he wrote back -

Unfortunately this information is not readily available in the gmail source. Things like the time, attachment name, sender email are very easy to get, but the file size would be much harder and would also delay the loading of the inbox as the program would have to send new requests to the server to work out each filename.
posted by meech at 11:35 PM on May 3, 2006

Do you know what the file extension of the majority of the files is?

You can search for the extension filename in your search box at the top of the gmail account screen. Hopefully you used something simple like ZIP or JPG, instead of something like RAR (only because the letters r-a-r might occur quite frequently).

This will at least narrow down your search.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:08 AM on May 4, 2006

If you don't mind adding a few minutes onto your morning routine and/or keeping another window open on your desktop, why shouldn't use your power-of-invitation to create new accounts? You could even name them depending on which files they would contain.
posted by malusmoriendumest at 4:28 AM on May 4, 2006

You can search for "has:attachment". If every email has an attachement, this won't help much.
posted by smackfu at 6:33 AM on May 4, 2006

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/keeping-your-gmail-inbox-size-under.html
posted by seinfeld at 9:42 AM on May 4, 2006

seinfeld: that actually helps, thanks. I'm down to 93%, but it's still kind of a pain.
posted by signal at 10:25 AM on May 4, 2006

why not make a new gmail and start autoforwarding the old address to the new account? Trimming the largest attachments will only buy a bit of time before you'll have to face that limit again
posted by dorcas at 6:24 PM on May 4, 2006