Yep, I ran out of space on Gmail

For a long time, it was like having an unlimited credit card — when you reached your limit someone paid the bill and gave you a higher limit… last night my 3+ year long e-mail storage binge had to come to an end.  I finally ran out of space in my gmail account.  Yes, it is amazing I had over 20,000 messages in my box and I was using almost 3 gig of space.  It turns out my timing was good,  Google generously offered to double my space to 6 gig for $20 a year (a pittance) but I decided that what I really needed was to clean house.

In the space of about an hour I want from 20,000 messages to around 5,000  (39% of the storage limit) by:

1. Deleting 3 years worth of old work emails (I don’t work there anymore and live in a different state) that I forwarded to gmail because I had a very stingy corporate email storage limit.

2.  Searching for yahoo, finding and deleting most of my mailing list messages.

3. Searching for and deleting other mailing list messages (especially the ones that email several times a day — yikes!)

As fate would have it, a blog entry from Amy at Contentious inspired me to do even more.  She recently cleaned out her inbox using GTD wizard Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero method.  So, I took another hour and winnowed through the emails — deleting some, and archiving most (I use GTD as a back up brain/filing system — it has saved my tush numerous times — why would I purposely forget anything?).

I suppose it’s a matter of balance — the need to save space vs. the need to save information.  For right now, I’m working on deleting things that I know I don’t need (like flylady reminders to clear my house hotspots — she’lll send it again (and again).  Somehow I think she might approve of this whole electronic housecleaning effort…

Anyone have a good system for taming your e-beast?