We were all trained to archive all emails we receive. After all, we basically have infinite storage and we can just find all the emails we need with a quick search, right? Makes sense. But this is a trap.
Gmail promised infinite storage, but didn’t keep
Whether you use Gmail or not, it’s important to understand that the idea of never deleting emails has been widely popularized by Gmail. Before that, people generally deleted their emails regularly. You had to delete them to free up space so you could receive more emails.
Gmail was revolutionary when it launched in 2004. Google’s email service delivered 1 GB of free email storage. This embarrassed its competitors – the free version of Microsoft Hotmail offered a tiny 2MB at the time. Yes, Gmail was launched with five hundred times more free storage than 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 continued to add free storage space. In 2005, on Gmail’s one-year anniversary, Gmail’s free storage space doubled to 2 GB. Georges Harik, director of product management at Gmail, said the right thing to do was “keep giving people more space forever”.
Why delete emails when Google will continue to offer more and more storage space until the end of time? As Harik pointed out, as technology advances, storage is cheaper for Google and everyone else. It looks good … but Google has changed its mind.
Free Google Account storage stopped in 2013
In 2013, Google set a 15 GB storage limit for a free Google account. This Google account storage has been merged across all Google services: Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos. If you store 10 GB of files, you have only 5 GB left for emails.
Google hasn’t added any free storage since. In fact, Google is taking away the free storage space it offers for photos.
If your plan was to never delete emails and expect Google to continue increasing your account’s storage, it didn’t work. Your email account has been filling slowly for the past seven or eight years.
Why pay 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’ll have a lot more space to store your emails.
Google is not the only company that charges more for storage. Microsoft’s Outlook.com offers 15 GB of free storage space, increased to 50 GB if you are a paying Microsoft 365 subscriber. Apple iCloud email uses iCloud storage, and the famous Apple offers only 5 GB free storage for all backups of your device and iCloud data.
That’s why companies encourage you to never delete emails. They profit when your email account is full and you need to pay for a subscription to continue storing everything.
It’s a bit like a locker company encouraging you to never give away your useless trash. Of course, they want you to keep it – they profit when you need to pay to store it forever.
Yes, these emails are taking up too much space
But how much space are e-mails taking up, really? Aren’t they tiny? They are just text, right?
Well, if you do have gigabytes of email in your account, you know that is not quite true.
Of course, individual emails are small, but they add up. If your email account is full, you have a lot of space used by useless emails. All those newsletters, notifications, alerts and other unwanted messages you’ve received over the years are probably using up a little space – when you add them up.
If you’re using Gmail, for example, the Google One Storage page shows how much space is used by your Gmail emails.
You don’t need most of them, and search is not ideal
How often do you go back and search or check your old emails? Of course, you probably have some important emails you want to keep – but most of them are probably not important. You don’t need them and would never have noticed if you clicked “Delete” instead of “Archive” in that useless email newsletter.
What’s worse, having tens or hundreds of thousands of emails makes it harder to search for the emails that interest you. “Archive everything and use the search to find what you like” becomes difficult when you have 200,000 emails spread around and are trying to find that important email from ten years ago.
Delete instead of archiving and keep only what interests you
Instead of archiving all of the emails you receive, try deleting those that are not important to you. You will free up space and not have to pay to store useless emails.
If an email is important, archive it or consider putting it in a folder or label that will make it easier to find in the future. But even if you archive only the emails that interest you (instead of all emails), you will be much better off.
In the USA, emails are “abandoned” after 180 days
All of these are good arguments for cleaning up your email account, even if you are not particularly concerned with email privacy. But if you’re concerned about privacy, know the following:
In the USA, emails are considered “abandoned” after 180 days. The government can consult 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 pointed out in 2013, “It is beyond ridiculous that email (but not mail) has been left out of privacy laws.”
Attempts have been made to correct this gap and demand that the government obtain a warrant before accessing emails older than 180 days. The most notable attempt was in 2016, when the Email Privacy Act was unanimously passed in the United States House of Representatives and died in the Senate. In January 2021, the law remained.
So, if you are storing a lot of old emails in an online account, remember this.
It’s time to delete those old useless emails
Now you just need to start cleaning up all the archived emails that you have been dragging for a decade or more.
How you do this depends on the type of email that is taking up space. For example, if you regularly receive newsletters from [email protected] and have them archived, search for “[email protected]” in your emails and delete all messages from that sender.
Here are some tips for freeing up space in Gmail.
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