When Google said that their new free email service was coming with 1Gb of free space, everybody believe they were crazy or that it was a practical joke (it was a April 1st after all). When they start adding up the free space, people wonder how much storage capabilities they have. The philosophy of never delete a mail seemed like a joke, why would we need 1 Gb when hotmail was offering 2 Mb an it was enough.

But now, several years latter, and with over 7 Gb of free storage, I find my self that my gmail account is full, and I need to save some space. How did that happened? Attachments, blogs with pictures, Picasa albums and using my gmail account as a online storage system.

How to clean your gmail account

If your gmail account is completely full you won't be receiving any mails, so you better start cleaning up a little bit. Theres several approaches to this problem, here I bring you some of the methods you can try.

Delete mails

You don't want to loose important mails, so if you are planning to delete mails you have to carefully filter them, you have plenty of options to search in your inbox, so you can use some of these keys:

• from: if you want to delete mails for a specific person, like that aunt that sends you all the powerpoints
• has:attachment to sort all your mails that have attachments
• in:sent To sort all the mails you sent
• before:2006/01/01 To sort all the mails you send before a specific date.

You can combine these four options to find mails to delete. For example mails with attachment sent by you before a specific date.

You also can look for mails that are not important and that you can delete easily. You can use the search engine to find mails that contain:

• Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
• no-reply

Or identify Forums or lists you are subscribed in.

Delete Pictures located in Picasa

Picasa uses the same storage of your gmail account, so you may want to delete the picture there. Also the pictures you uploaded to your blogger accounts are using valuable space. You always can create a new account for your pictures.

Backup Mail

If you don't want to miss the valuable informations that your mails may have, you have the option to create a back-up and delete all your mails that are online. The problem with this trick, is that you will loose one of Gmail grate advantages of having all your mails online.

To do this, you can use a POP3 client like Thunderbird or Outlook.

• Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page, and open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
• Select Enable POP for all mail.
• Click Save Changes.
• Open the mail client for Gmail, and check for new messages.

You can manually delete your mails, or you can click on the option that deletes the copy on Gmail. This system is slow because it has to download all your mails to your computer, and Gmail does this on batches.

Delete Attachments

This option is a little more tricky because gmail doesn't support the option to sort by Size, or to delete just the Attachments saving the mails. For this you can use a IMAP client, the method is faster because you don't need to download everything, just the headers.

In Mozilla Thunderbird, theres an option called “Detach”, that lets you save your mail's attachments into your computer and delete them from your online mail. To be able to do this in an easy way you can follow this list:

• Configure the IMAP account on your Mozilla Thunderbird. (If you give all your personal information to Thunderbird's Wizard, the program will configure this by itself).
• Go to Find/Search Messages
• Search all the mails with Size grater than 50000 (that is 5mb you can change the number).
• Save as a Search Folder
• Go to your main screen and go to the Search Folder you just created and select all the messages.
• Go to File/Attachments/Detach All and give the program a folder where to download everything.
• Wait until the program downloads all your attachments.
• Close Thunderbird and go to yout Gmail, now you should have free space to keep using it.

Buy more space

If you run out of space, you always can buy more. Right now Google offers 20 Gb at 5 dollars a year. Is not expensive and it let you keep all the mails you have.

Change address

You always can open a new gmail account and start from zero. But if you don't want to tell all people you change mails, you can make your current address redirect the mails to your new account (deleting them after this), and change the mail sender in the new account so the people keep receiving mails from your original account. The problem with this, is that you'll lose the sender address in the process and all new mails will arrive from your own account.

Create a “Delete” label

Create a label where you start putting old and new mails to be deleted. You can delete weekly or monthly

Change to a mail client

You can start using a mail client like Thunderbird or Outlook, telling Google that deletes all the messages reviewed by the client. This is a handy option if you only use one computer.

Conclusions

As you can see, theres a lot of options to keep your inbox at hand. Some of them are a little difficult, or take a lot of time, but in general you won't have problems and will thank a clean mailbox.

How do you organize your inbox, and what tricks do you use to avoid reaching the max capacity of your account?.

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