We are all trained to archive every email we receive. After all, we have infinite storage and we can find all the emails we need with a quick search, right? Makes sense. But it’s a trap.
Gmail promises endless storage, but does not keep up
Whether you use Gmail or not, it’s important to understand that the idea of never deleting emails is widely popular with Gmail. Before that, people used to delete their emails on a regular basis. You had to remove it to free up space so you could get more emails.
Gmail was shaken when it was launched in 2004. Google’s email service provides at least 1 GB of free email storage. It embarrassed its competitors – the free version of Microsoft Hotmail offered a small 2 MB at the time. Yes, Gmail is available with five hundred times as much storage space as Microsoft’s email service. No wonder Gmail has become so popular. Its competitors struggled to keep up, but even they added a lot more storage space.
Google still added free storage. In 2005, on Gmail’s anniversary, Gmail’s free storage doubled to 2 GB. Georges Harik, Gmail Product Management Director, said the right thing to do is give people more space forever.
Why delete emails if Google keeps giving you more storage space until the end of time? As Harik pointed out, storage is getting cheaper for Google and everyone else as technology advances. Sounds good … but Google changed its mind.
Free Google Account Storage Stalled in 2013
In 2013, Google set a 15 GB storage limit for a free Google Account. Google Account Storage has been merged into all Google services: Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. If you save 10 GB of files, you only have 5 GB left for email.
Google has not added any free storage since. In fact, Google is taking away the free storage space it provides for photos.
If you’ve never intended to delete emails and are hoping that Google will continue to increase your account’s storage space, it did not work out. Your email account has been slowly filling up for the past seven or eight years.
Why pay money to store useless emails?
Here’s the thing: Google sells storage as a subscription as part of Google One. If you pay a monthly subscription fee, you get a lot more space to store your email.
Google is not the only company that charges extra for storage. Microsoft.com’s Outlook.com offers 15 GB of free storage, up to 50 GB if you’re a paying Microsoft 365 subscriber. Apple iCloud Email uses your iCloud storage, and Apple famously offers only a small 5 GB of free storage for all your backups and iCloud data on your device.
This is why businesses encourage you to never delete emails. It makes a profit when your email account is full, and you have to pay for a subscription to save everything.
It’s a bit like a storage closet business that encourages you to never give away your useless trash. Of course, they want you to keep it – they make a profit if you pay to store it forever.
Yes, those emails use a lot of space
But how much space do emails take up? Aren’t they small? It’s just a text, right?
Well, if you really have gigabytes of email in your account, you know this is not entirely true.
Sure, individual emails are small – but it counts. If your email account is full, you have a lot of space to use useless emails. All the newsletters, notifications, alerts, and other junk you’ve received over the years probably use up a lot of space – if you add them up.
For example, if you use Gmail, the Google One Storage page shows how much space your Gmail emails use.
You do not need most, and search is not ideal
How often do you go back and search or check your old email? Of course, you have some important emails that you want to keep, but most of them are probably not important at all. You do not need it, and you would never notice it if you clicked “Delete” instead of “Archive” on the useless email.
What’s worse: if you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails, it’s harder to search for the emails you’re interested in. ‘Archive everything and use search to find what you care about’ becomes difficult as you flip through 200,000 emails, trying to find one important email from ten years ago.
Remove instead of archive and keep only what you care
Instead of archiving every email you get, you can delete the ones you don’t care about. You free up space and you do not have to pay to store useless emails.
If an email is important, archive the person – or consider placing it in a folder or label that will be easier to find in the future. But even if you only archive the email you care about (instead of all the emails), you’ll be much better off.
In the US, emails are “abandoned” after 180 days
These are all good arguments for clearing your email account, even if you are not concerned about privacy by email. But if you’re concerned about privacy, know this:
In the US, email is considered “abandoned” after 180 days. The government can view these emails without a warrant, thanks to the Electronic Communications Protection Act, a law passed in 1986 when electronic communications were very different.
As Wired remarked in 2013: “It’s ridiculous that email (but not email) has stayed out of privacy laws.”
Attempts have been made to rectify this gap and require the government to obtain a warrant before they are more than 180 days old for email. The most notable attempt was in 2016, when the Email Privacy Act passed unanimously in the U.S. House of Representatives and died in the Senate. From January 2021, the law applies.
So if you store a lot of old emails in an online account, keep that in mind.
Time to delete that old useless email
Now you just need to clean up all the archive emails that you have been dragging for a decade or more.
How you do this depends on the type of email that takes up space. For example, if you regularly receive newsletters from [email protected] and archive them, search for emails on “[email protected]” and delete all messages from the sender.
Here are some tips to free up space in Gmail.
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