15 gigs of email

I’ve got a Gmail account. I’ve had it since 2004. Google lets you have fifteen (15) gigabytes of storage space for your email.

It seems that after twenty-two (22) years I have finally used up all my storage space. I am now getting messages from Google that my email account will no longer be ale to send or receive email within the next two weeks. If I want to keep using it, I need to buy space from them. I don’t know. After using the service for free for twenty plus years, it seems wrong to have to start paying for it, especially on a subscription plan. (Of course, Google can take it away at any time, but hopefully if they do hey will give some advanced notice and let me download it all.)

Looking at the total number of emails I have archived it looks like I’m at 173,271.

< Keanu Reeves in the Matrix> Woah!

I guess I’m a email packrat. I’ve ignored all those ‘inox zero’ webinars and productivity gurus who say that you shouldn’t have anything in your inbox at the end of the day. Instead everything should be either archived or deleted. Mine’s all archived, it’s just archived in my inbox.

I’ve started going through it all to see what I can delete to free up some space. I have tons of newsletters from my tech days, covering all manner of programming topics. Given that I’m no longer i the programing game, and much of that information is now grossly out of date, I’m jettisoning them. I feel kind of bad about it as I think they make for an interesting historical look at the programming world since 2004. I can see the evolution of HTML and web development, CSS, various languages that make the web interactive (ColdFusion, ASP, Java, PHP, JavaScript, etc). But I’m not the web’s historian. There are others that fill that niche, so into the void the newsletters go.

I’ve got a lot of ‘forum’ emails, from various groups related to role-playing games. These are more painful to get rid of, as they have lots of good ideas for scenarios across multiple genres, character write-ups, comparisons of various RPG systems. This is all my ‘fun’ stuff, as opposed to ‘work’ stuff mentioned above.

Another category is stuff about writing. This falls a little in both camps as I find it fun and I hope to make a living at it. There is a combination of newsletters and ‘forum’ type emails in this group. The newsletters are probably more useful than the ‘forum’ emails. I’ll jettison the forum emails before the newsletters.

Pretty much the only emails I’m still going to keep are personal emails. But even some of them might go. I have many which have attachments, mainly photos. Those certainly take up a lot of storage space. Unless they have some other information included I’ll be downloading the photos, then deleting the emails. Hopefully that will start freeing up a lot of space.

I went to the very beginning of my email history and started deleting the tech newsletters. I spent several hours this evening deleting them. It seems I haven’t deleted enough to make a dent. Google tells me I’m still at one hundred percent (100%) capacity of my 15 gigabyte limit. Maybe I was over the limit to begin with and I’m bringing the level down below the limit.

Anyway, I guess it is time to just let all the stuff go. I don’t really need 15 gigs of email. No one really needs that much. (Cue Bill Gates quote from the early days of computing “No one needs more than 64K of memory”.) I’ll delete things in the order I listed them above and hopefully free up enough space before my email account becomes totally useless.

If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum