Today I need to get some email from my inbox and noticed I hat 6,000+ unread messages and I was also at 92% capacity. So I needed to way to manage all of that in a quick and easy manor.
You’d think almost 7 gigs would be more than enough space to store your email – I’ve been ignoring this for days, but I finally had to do something.
However, forwarding all those messages by hand or downloading 6+ gigs 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 92% of quota down to 67% of quota without losing one important message. Here’s how I did it.
First I created Labels for each filter, seperating all the emails with large file attachments, figuring that was the bulk of my issues. I typed in filters as you see below. Once the filter loaded the messages, I went in and applied the label to all previous messages.
filename:wmv -label:nodelete
filename:mov -label:nodelete
filename:mp3 -label:nodelete
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 that need to hit the trash!
Ahhhh…. I feel James Brown good!
Tags: clean gmail, filter gmail, gmail
