SWMBO now has so many unread emails that she is now paying Google for extra storage space. 15 gigabytes isn't enough.

She currently has more than 20,000 unread emails, more than 17,000 in her in-box alone, going back as much as five or six years. There is absolutely zero chance that she will ever look at any email more than a month or two old.

I would like to arbitrarily delete everything in her in-box that is more than three months old. The best I have been able to do is delete them one screenful (i.e., 100 emails) at a time. Is there a better way?

tanstaafl.

- search for "older:2017/04/01"
- select UNREAD (via checkbox under search box)
- In the very first line, just above your emails, this line will appear : "All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search"
- click "Select all conversations that match this search" (everything is now selected)
- click "delete" (ONLY if you're sure!!)

Those steps will work. You could also replace the first two steps with this string:

older:2017/04/01 is:unread

You could also eliminate the largest emails first, by searching for everything over a certain size, by adding the size flag:

older:2017/04/01 is:unread size:5m

That will search for everything unread, older than April 1st, and 5MB or larger.

But the first thing I'd do is delete the stuff in her social and promotions categories to see how much space that saves you:

older:2017/04/01 is:unread category:social

You might be surprised how much space freed up by that purge alone.

In the case of all of these searches, you'll need to do what Archeon said and select all the conversations, then click on that link at the top of the page, then delete.

To then free up the space immediately, you'll have to go into the trash and empty it. Otherwise you'll have to wait 30 days to see the space free up.

Based on the fact that these emails are piling up, I would suggest that a month or two ago, she wasn't reading emails that were new then.

Extrapolating from that, she's not going to read the emails that are new now, and you should just delete everything.

Looking at some of those subjects/senders, it seems that part of the problem is that she's gotten herself on a bunch of mailing lists that are doing nothing for her, but cluttering her inbox. Can you unsubscribe her from any of that stuff?

Great point. One of the only ways to tame an inbox is to be sure to unsubscribe from mailing lists. GMail makes it very easy, too. When you open some emails, next to the sender's email address you'll see an "unsubscribe" link, where Google takes care of it for you.

You could mark it as spam, but that kind of stuff usually isn't actually spam, so it's more helpful that you unsubscribe.

Yeah - I'd search and destroy useless, mail-list messages first.

I routinely mine older, meaningful messages. Just tonight, swmbo asked me about a feasibility study group I was on a few years ago. Easy to answer with a little careful email searching. I'd hate to have lost those messages, especially as a document involved was one I had saved in my email, but was no longer on the county website...

I auto-label listserv messages to make it easy to prune them, en masse.

-jk

I definitely hold on to my emails indefinitely as well. Every email gets archived, just in case, and I refer to them all the time, so I know it's not a waste of space

Doug, how is she filling up so much space? What kind of email is she getting? I ask, because I NEVER delete my email, I've had GMail since 2005, and I've only used 9.1GB. I happen to pay for Drive storage for other stuff anyway, but still, you have to be a VERY busy emailer to need that much storage space. I support a top realtor who runs a 15-person real estate group, and she's using about 40GB, but she's dealing with dozens of clients at a time, running her business, sending PDFs back and forth, etc.

Just squinting at the image you included, I bet you could get a couple hundred MB back simply by deleting all the NYTimes.com emails. Go through and unsubscribe from stuff like that, then delete all the emails you got from those sources. That'll help immensely. And certainly wipe out absolutely everything in those Social and Promotions categories. I can't see how many emails are in those, but it sure looks like the unread count is in the hundreds.

My guess: some of those emails have file attachments. Are there filtering options in Gmail to sort emails by those which have the largest file attachments? I'll bet that if you can do that, you'll find that there are a handful of emails taking up the majority of the space. I'd argue that that's the most efficient way to free up space, rather than doing it by date.




Back when I was the guy running the email server, your type was the bane of my existence. :-)

Of course these days with Google's generous storage allotment and their method for enforcing quotas, it's easier to be a pack rat, and it makes a lot of sense. I tend to do the same thing these days.

Definitely. I had instructions for that in a previous post, but I Doug hasn't updated us on his progress, so I'm still throwing stuff at the wall

I forgot to mention in that previous email that the following flag might be useful:

has:attachment

But if you're searching for emails above a few MB you'll probably be mostly seeing emails with attachments.


That's why I put my small business clients in the cloud

I totally get that it's a waste of space, but I have tons, and I really do refer to old emails constantly. GMail search makes it so easy.

I haven't forgotten about you. But SWMBO is currently out of the country and I am delaying until she returns to make sure I am doing what she really wants needs.

All of the suggestions are excellent. I hadn't realized that the Firefox UI was so powerful.

tanstaafl.

No worries!


GMail?

Uhh, yeah. That's what I meant to say.

tanstaafl.

I'm trying to teach my teen son about gmail's labels and filters. He's subscribed to an enormous number of youtube channels; they were flooding his inbox. I've shown him how to set it up to move all the video links into a "folder" (really a label in gmail-speak), watch the ones he wants, and easily delete the rest.

-jk

It's funny, before I used GMail I was an Outlook user (considering the time frame it was probably Outlook Express), and I religiously sorted my emails into folders and subfolders.

When I started using GMail, I did the same thing with labels for a good year or three, then completely gave up and simply archived everything because the search was so good.

I can see it being useful for organizing incoming emails like the ones you mention, though.

Quick side rant: Youtube channels are the worst organizational structure I've ever seen. It boggles my mind that there is no way to subscribe to a show, only the channel. I like TableTop, but I'm sorry Felicia, I don't want every show on Geek & Sundry.

So the only systematic way to keep up on when a new episode is released is to subscribe to Geek & Sundry, and just ignore all the episodes of the other shows that come out.

It's like having to set my DVR to record all of FX just to watch the Walking Dead, and I have to delete the other shows I don't watch.

Am I just doing it wrong? Is there something about Youtube I'm not getting?

No, you're correct. Their organizational model seems to depend on youtube "channels" not becoming like TV channels. Of course, that's precisely what they became. I can't imagine why, with a name like "channels" and everything. :-)

I agree that they should have two subscription levels and make it work more like you want it to work.

I'm wondering if we're just not young enough to be into it. Maybe we need to be kids like JK's son, since that appears to be the primary demographic of Youtube. Or maybe they're willing to put up with the BS.

...or maybe they have way more free time than I can comprehend anymore so they simply watch everything...

I wouldn't be surprised if were more the latter...

-jk

I'd more like to know how the kids deal with the noise ratio of all the junk vids.

I suspect it's something learned at the neural level. They likely have some way to spot the and abandon the crud a lot more quickly than I ever will.

When he gets back from his scout 4 day hike, I'll ask him...

-jk