Lessons of an email hoarder: how to free up space in your Gmail ACCT

After receiving a Google opinion explaining that the company would no longer tolerate my recklessness, I had to approach my succession of e-mails and start deleting messages.

In reality, the opinion told me that I was “without storage and that I would stop receiving emails in 29 days”, but I did it as a revelation on how I had managed my reception box.

Sometimes the elements of Google Drive or Google Photos can lead to the diffusion of the storage space, but in my case, my reception box was the problem.

Cleaning and managing Gmail is a process in progress, but as the popular Chinese proverb says, “a thousand kilometers trip begins with a single step”.

I decided to take an hour or two on weekends to start tackling my reception box.

That day, I released 20% of my Google storage space and made a conscious decision to replace part of the time I spent scrolling on social networks by removing the emails from my Gmail account in the future.

The promotions category is the easiest place to start removing emails. Nine chances out of 10, you will not remember to register for any of these offers.

I had more than 16,000 offers from 2018 which had never been opened – with things that I would never buy. I don’t even know how most of these promotions have found me.

Gmail allowed me to select up to 50 messages to be deleted on each page and gave me the possibility of erasing each conversation of the promotions category.

I first deleted a few pages before choosing to delete all the conversations in the promotion section so that I can withdraw unwanted diffusion lists.

You can delete all your emails in one or two clicks, but this is just a short-term solution to a more important problem. These same sender will have your full reception box the next day – and you could delete something important by mistake.

I chose to carefully screen the first pages of my promotions file and to unwanted unwanted newsletters in a proactively.

Gmail makes it easy. I have just hovered the mouse on each email, and if the unsubscription option was available, a box that said “unsubscribed” appeared. I clicked on this box and I was set.

This allowed me to unsubscribe from dozens of distribution lists in seconds.

After traveling my most recent promotion emails, I selected everything and sent it to the trash. This process was easy, but the mass deletion emails of my main reception box have taken a little more tact.

I scanned on each e -mail page, and each time I came across a recurring message that I have never opened – like messages from this dance camp, I recorded my niece three years ago – I uninized from this broadcast list.

Then, I typed the name or email address of the sender in the search zone by e-mail at the top of Gmail and placed quotes around him.

This has generally raised all the emails I received from this sender. From there, I selected all the messages and I deleted them en masse. You can also repeat these steps in your “social” and “updates” file.

If you forget to empty the waste folder, you can delete each email from your reception box, but that would not release a thumb of storage space.

The trash folder can usually be found by clicking on the Gmail menu in the upper left corner and scrolling the spam backrest. Sometimes you may have to click on the “Plus” button after the draft folders to reveal it.

Once I opened the garbage file, I had the possibility of restoring e-mails deleted by mistake, to select the emails to be permanently deleted, or “empty the garbage now” to get rid of everything in a single time.

I chose to delete all the messages. Once deleted from the trash, they had left for good.

After crossing all these steps, my reception box was much cleaner and I avoided having to pay an additional storage space to receive new emails. It may seem a lot, but it was effortless.

My biggest lesson was to let go and delete. We have enough to manage in the real world. Why keep digital waste?