Time for an Email Purge

Fastest way to get rid of 13,848 unread emails? Well, by quitting my job, my corporate email account disappeared into a poof of dust. 😀

I had a similar mess of emails in my personal account, but alas, you can’t quit life. I had thousands of unread emails, hundreds of drafts, and so many emails stored that I was at almost 100% of my 17GB of Google storage.

Since I was starting a new chapter of life, I decided to clear my inbox. It felt scary to draw a line in the sand and say everything that I had not read up until this point would be archived. Nevertheless, I did a big “select all” in Gmail. I marked all those messages as read and archived everything.

Frankly, I have never been so happy to see the “empty state” of a screen before. It felt like there was an angelic glow around it!

That didn’t reduce my storage use though. I still had no space left! AHHHH!

EMAIL PURGE

My friend Alice decided it was time for an intervention. We agreed to meet up and do an email purge on our respective computers. We would be ruthless in assuring each other that most things should be laid in their final resting place in the trash. Our other friend Dorris heard about our plans, and jumped on board too.

The evening of the email purge arrived. We met up, decided we were hungry, and went to eat pho. Ah, procrastination as its finest. We came back and Dorris fell into a food coma on the couch. 😛

Alice and I were left to fend for ourselves. We started off nice and easy. I was deleting marketing emails from retailers, but the percentage of storage used was not dropping. I needed bigger and bolder measures.

PHOTOS

I checked this Google dashboard to see how my storage was being used. My photos were taking up a heck of a lot of space. I headed over to the Google Photos settings page to downgrade my full res photos into “high quality” ones (which Google allows unlimited storage for). The compression took ages to complete, but it was an easy win.

GMAIL

Next I moved on to tackle the beast of emails. I looked at this article for advice on how to find those big culprits that were eating up all my storage. The golden search query was:

larger:25M

By typing this into the search bar in Gmail, I could see the list of emails that were larger than 25MB and then DESTROY THEM with no mercy! That was fun, so I decided to search for the next largest email messages.

larger:20M

I deleted those, and then kept searching for the next biggest files that were remaining. I was on a roll!

larger:16M

larger:13M

In the meantime, the percentage of storage used was dropping magnificently – down to 91%, then 84%, and then *BAM* 58%!

OLD EMAILS

If those numbers sound exciting, then wait ‘til you hear what I excavated from my inbox. First up, I found a PDF attachment of a 1200-page textbook on computer science algorithms from college. I had no idea why it was there or how I obtained it. But the associated class brings back nightmares. Late nights in a computer cluster eating chicken parmesan from a takeout box and staring at unsolvable homework questions. *Clicks the trash can icon* Never going to need that again!

I’m a sucker for signing up for mailing lists, but I can’t keep up with them. On occasion, I filter them into a folder. With a swift reality check from Alice, I had to finally admit that I would never go back to look at them. Goodbye, emails. I wish I could have read you, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Then I proceeded to delete emails with photos, videos, zip files, and slide decks from school projects from OVER A DECADE AGO. I got rid of old emails with job recruiters, which if I had pursued would have completely changed the course of my life in terms of living location, work experience, and people that I met. 

I also came across was an email from 2009 entitled  “YAYYY HANSON!!!!!” when my college friends and I got tickets to see Hanson in downtown Boston. We were so excited. The thread even included some MP3 song files to get us pumped up! Goodbye Hanson, you’re not cool anymore, and I need the email storage space.

At the same time, Alice discovered unredeemed gift card money from 2014. How great is it to find find free money?? I think Dorris felt inspired (or guilty) and got up from the couch to turn on her computer to delete a couple too. We high-fived each other for our progress and took a break by eating sour gummy worms.

EMAIL DRAFTS

Later I switched to tackling my 739 email drafts. Some drafts made no sense! There were drafts with a single phone number in them, but no mention of who it was for. -_-

I found unsent emails to friends and family, TODO lists, journal entries, house hunting links, articles, and book recommendations – all these emails that would never receive the glory of a “sent” timestamp.

I opened a draft to a guy that I met in the Philippines and had a crush on (years ago). For a moment, I was so confused. “Wait…. when did I know how to speak Tagalog?? Never??” Then I remembered I used an online translation tool, trying to be clever to impress him. 😛 Anyhow, definitely not going to send that email anymore!

It’s funny how our email archives can be a reflection of our relationship history. There were old emails and chats with past guys I had dated or been interested in. It was nostalgic. I saw how I grew as a person over time, and learned to use periods instead of “lol” to transition between thoughts.

I also witnessed how my relationships with friends and family changed based on the number of email exchanges we had through the years. We become close to people and sometimes drift apart. “The only thing that’s constant in life is change.”

As much as I would’ve wanted to revisit each and every one of my hundreds of thousands of emails from my past, we had to eventually call it a night. Thanks to my friends who slayed the email dragons with me, I reached 49% storage! Wahoo!

It feels GREAT to have de-cluttered my digital life and to have a pie chart that is now beautifully symmetrical.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope you enjoyed this post! I’m off to add to the email clutter of the world by sending this post to my subscribers now! 😛