You'd think the gigabytes worth of space Google gives Gmail users would be more than enough to store your email, but for the last two weeks my Gmail account has hovered ominously above 95% of the allowed storage quota. When it finally peaked at 98% (2725 MB of 2780 MB), I had to do something.
However, forwarding all those messages by hand or downloading 2.7 gigabytes of mail were out of the question. I simply had to start hitting that delete button. Using a few effective filters that helped determine what I could safely delete, I took my Gmail account from 98% of quota down to 67% of quota without losing one important message. Here's how I did it.
1. Start big and narrow down.
The trick that worked best was to first delete stuff that I absolutely knew I would never miss and then narrow down my deletions to stuff more on the borderline. It's both safer and faster.
2. Add labels to certain senders to avoid losing important emails.
I've got about ten people whose emails I know that I want to keep about 99% of the time. It's mostly family and business contacts, but you know your "in group."
Create a filter that only shows messages that are from that certain group of people. You can use Gmail's advanced search operators to do so using the "or" (|) operator. For example, From: john | paul | ringo | george returns all emails from either John, Paul, Ringo or George. Set your filter to label those messages with a good, safe name. I used "nodelete."
UPDATE, 11/20/06: Here at Lifehacker HQ we've been using filters with the OR operator in them since we posted about it back in April with great success. However, the article author says it doesn't always work as expected for him: "Careful: Although the OR operator should include all messages from everyone included in the search, it acts a little quirky and sometimes leaves out messages that should, in theory, be included. Since you're doing this for the sheer purpose of protecting your messages, it might be safer to create your filters one name at a time."
Now you can exclude all messages in this label from your upcoming search and destroy missions.
3. Eliminate heinous offenders.
Although the has:attachment search operator yields a good list of space-hogging messages, it does not give you the option to sort by file size. So, with 2.7GB of email to sort through, it's pretty worthless.
But, you can search by file type and narrow down file sizes a bit that way. I used the following search phrases:
filename:wmv -label:nodelete
filename:mov -label:nodelete
filename:mp3 -label:nodelete (this one was pretty weak since MP3 is common in text)
filename:doc -label:nodelete
filename:pdf -label:nodelete
For each of those phrases, I just had to go through and actually use my brain to decide what to delete. This is the most time-consuming step, but it's not that hard. And, it's cathartic. Remember that if you press shift while selecting two messages, Gmail will select all messages in between. That's useful for big chunks of messages to go.
I lowered my Gmail usage by about 20% by using these first three steps, and that might be good enough for you. But, after this, if you want more, you can fine tune your deletions using the next few steps.
4. Delete stupid forwards.
I already have a filter to label all Fw:, Fwd:, Forward:, etc. emails with a Forwards label, and, in most cases, I have it set to automatically archive them. But, if you don't have one, create such a filter by simply specifying the common forward subject lines listed above. Then, use this search string:
label:forward -label:nodelete
...and start deleting manually.
If you've already looked for filename:_____ offenders, you probably won't achieve much with this step, but it's good to get rid of some crap anyway.
5. Delete emails from people that send you nothing but junk.
There is this one guy that literally sends every forward he gets to everyone in his address book. It's an amazing thing to watch day in and day out, and I have a Gmail filter set to automatically archive anything that ever comes from his email address with a forward subject line and label it with his cursed name.
In my cleanup, I just deleted all of his forwards without thinking twice. If you have such a friend(s), do the same to him or her or them. This applies to commercial emails as well.
6. Carefully delete emails from those people in your nodelete label.
You might even want to skip this step if you're satisfied, but, if you're really a clean freak, repeat steps 1-4 and leave out the -label:nodelete protection. Usually, people in your nodelete label won't send you a lot of junk (that's why you're friends), so this step can be really fast to clean up.
7. Empty trash and delete spam.
Gmail does not do this automatically, so don't forget to throw out the trash when you're done and go ahead and empty your spam while you're at it (even though spam doesn't affect your quota). This also gives you one last chance to give your deletions a glance to see if you deleted anything you didn't mean to delete.
A lot of you might say that I'm a promiscuous emailer/storer, and that's a fair charge. But, using these methods, we can all continue in our promiscuity without offending the god of Gmail (quotas).
In the future I might set up some storage Gmail accounts as readers previously suggested, but I'm hoping that following these steps about once a year will keep me behind Gmail's consistent storage increases.
Got any great search strings or filters for cleaning out your email archive? Let's hear 'em in the comments.
Stewart Rutledge is in his final year of law school at the University of Mississippi.