Sunday, July 20, 2014

Using Gmail?

I have been using Gmail for about ten years now, starting from back when you needed an "invitation" to get started. I really like it for two reasons. 1) it stores my mail on their server so I can get at old messages from any computer, not just the one I downloaded it onto and, 2) it has a great spam filter that keeps out 99.9% of the enlarging your penis ads and other garbage. It is easy to sort and store mail away in folders and they offer a huge individual storage area for free (15 GB right now).

However, if you have friends who like to send you photos, videos and other huge files, this storage can and does fill up. If you are like me and do not delete these emails as soon as you read them they stay on the server forever using up valuable space. It has always been difficult to sort Gmail files by size until now.

To find these large files simply type "size:5m" (without the quotation marks) in the search box at the top of the Gmail page. This will display all your files that are over 5 MB each in size. You can substitute other numbers to find smaller files. You can then examine each one and decide if you want to keep it or not. I just did this and was able to delete about fifty storage hogs that I had no further use for and reduced my storage use from 20% down to 9%. Only 50 emails were using up over half of my storage space!


6 comments:

  1. I keep on top of my G mail as well, don't need to keep them all forever!

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  2. I do not hold on to emails for long. There is a lot to like about GMail.

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  3. Got rid of a few I didn't know were there on mine. Good tip.

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  4. Replies
    1. Only after trying a few of the products, Chris? ;) ;) ;)

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