
I Went Back Through My Old Emails. It Was Glorious - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/gmail-inbox-storage-full.html
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navs
I wanted to clear my Gmail inbox but there's too much history, specifically
conversations with my late father. I still tear up seeing old messages. I
often wish I had voicemail and SMS stored like with email.

I'd definitely pay for something like that.

~~~
apostacy
I'm sorry to hear that so many of you are agonizing about this, but it is
totally unnecessary!

Storage space is so cheap and free now. And none of you have more emails than
could fit on a $4 jumpdrive.

You can even just go to Google Takeout[1], and have it export all of your
emails to your associated Google Drive account. You can store up to 15G. You
don't even have to worry about finding a place to store it. Takes only a few
minutes. And no time limit to download the archive from your Google Drive.

Why is this painful for any of you?? You can easily make a backup, AND also
declutter your account.

I almost feel like some people are so committed to minimalism that they are
forcing themselves to needlessly purge precious memories just to prove a point
about how hardcore they are about throwing things out. So I feel bad bursting
their bubble that this sacrifice is pointless.

[1]:
[https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en)

~~~
moretai
Like that famous dropbox post, people would rather pay for something.

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jhbadger
In the 1990s when email was text, I kept all of my mail -- it was only a few
megabytes per year. To this day I have a record of what I was doing from 1992
to 2000. It's really amazingly nostalgic to go through it, and sometimes sad
as when reading e-mails from mentors who have since died.

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CosmicShadow
I'm hitting that 97% point in my Gmail and starting to figure out how to clear
out the crap that's accumulated since I got my address in early 2004. I want
to just delete massive amounts based on filters, but I don't want to
accidentally erase receipts or actual messages. Not sure what to do that isn't
a massive time suck, nor do I want to pay Google.

Definitely pulled out some old memories when I go back that far into
University days. It's hard going through 16 years thinking I never need to
delete anything in case I want to look it up one day, but now I have to
actually delete junk as it comes in.

~~~
gwern
Export via POP to make a permanent local archive, then delete en masse? Bonus:
less for hackers if/when they breach your account.

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stareatgoats
I found an instruction on how to use filters in order to make this less
painful [0] which was helpful, to me at least (yeah, never bothered to
investigate filters before ...).

The filters uses the gmail "query language" [1].

[0] [https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/automatically-delete-
old-...](https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/automatically-delete-old-messages-
gmail-16193.html)

[1]
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en)

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timbit42
Sort by size and delete the big stuff you don't need to keep first. Deleting
small emails in a sea of 15 GB won't help.

~~~
stareatgoats
How do you sort by size in gmail?

