Annoyances Related to Gmail

I am well aware of the insanity of filling up my seemingly limitless storage on my Gmail account, but I have indeed. "Switch to Yahoo! mail" a friend urged me. I've had a Yahoo! account since the nineties, but well, it seems awfully cartoonish when contrasted with the pared down obtuseness of Gmail that I've come to know, love and rely on.

It's sort of shocking to me that Google would lag behind Yahoo! on anything. But they do. I can't imagine that there are many other people who reach their limit - why not just bump the storage up? It's puzzling.

And back to the insanity of my Inbox for a moment... I currently have 9592 messages in my active Inbox. 20,778 when I go into "All Mail" view, which includes archived messages. This is after some pretty aggressive day-to-day pruning.

I get tons of email newsletters, but delete as I read. I also am conscientious about weeding out the spam that makes it past Gmail's (very good) filters. I need an intervention! Or perhaps it's time to declare email bankruptcy? Regardless, if you're irked that I haven't responded to an email sent to you, please don't take it personally. I'm dancing as fast as I can.

Comments

[dalton]

This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but hold on for a sec. You can sign up for a second Gmail account for free. Then forward all incoming mail from your original account to your new one. You can set up the new account to reply to all messages as if they're coming from the first account. Not just the "reply-to" address, but the "from" address as well. It's seamless, and gives you an instant 3 GB.

The only problem is that you've got to access your old account for archived messages. It isn't hard if you're a Mac user, just use Mailplane to quickly switch between accounts. You could theoretically have an unlimited number of accounts.

[miss representation]

It seems to be rare. I just moved to the Google Apps (they have a 10GB box, tho you gots to pay for it) because of it. When telling people, everyone is amazed to hear I've been at 95%+ for months.

It's not the email ct. I suspect you could hold hundreds of thousands of messages. It's the attachments that kill you, and the inability to discard attachments without deleting entire threads.

Oh, and if you are wondering, the new mutiple accts feature doesn't support gmail (you can fwd from gmail to gmail , thought, without picking up any spam).

[Jen Bekman]

Oh, it's all so complicated!

I have a bunch of Gmail accounts already (I had to claim the various usernames I've run through during all these years on the internerds.)

I just hate the idea of the toggling between accounts and not having everything all in one place. I will look into this Mailplane of which you speak, Dalton.

[yp]

Ugh, I'm having the same problem. My gmail box is constantly at 99 percent full even when I go through and clean it out AND delete all spam and trash. I agree that it's the attachments. You can sort for emails with attachments and after I deleted a few hundred of those emails was able to knock the capacity down about 10 percent.

[Robert]

I was looking at mine the other day - normally I just access it through my Mail program, and noticed I was filling up. So I started deleting messages, then had this epiphany, which was just to delete the lot.

I highly recommend it. It keeps all the addresses, and anything *really* important you will remember, or someone will remind you.

*DELETE ALL*