Thursday, September 29, 2011

Clearing out your Gmail Inbox

There are times when you are just stuck in queues and have to wait for your turn. I think society in general tends to make us think that we are in a uber fast paced world but only to hit you back to reality with long queues and lines. Traffic jams are a norm these days and long queues at most outlets such as "ChaTime" or the immigration department seems to be one of these norms.



Anyway, the other day, I sent my car in to the service center and while I was waiting for my car to be serviced, I tapped into the free wi-fi and started trying to figure out some site online to fill my time. Of course in this digital world, emails are one of my key communication tools so I logged in to my email accounts. First mail I read was an automated email from my email administrator informing me that I was reaching the limit for my mailbox size.

I guess I still am not used to having a 150MB limit especially ever since I have been using Gmail. So being the usual curious guy, I went to my Gmail account to check how much space I have actually used.



Yikes! 51% usage for my Gmail account and increasing! The first thing I did like every other normal Outlook user would do, was to try to figure out how to sort my emails by size. And only by then can I select the largest sized ones and delete them. Apparently that didn't work because based on Google's Gmail theory, you don't need to sort your mails with Gmail.

After mucking through the search results, I chanced upon this site, https://www.findbigmail.com/

What it basically does is to help you scan through your Gmail account and then provides you with an email which provides several pie charts to visualize the emails you have archived.



The image above shows the scan results of my Gmail and the top 20 emails are all more than 20Mb in size. Most of them are me sending images about and after clearing them, I have managed to free up quite a fair bit of space within my mailbox.

As a result of the scan, it also creates 3 categories or 3 labels in your Gmail account and labels the emails accordingly.



By clicking on these labels, it pulls out emails that are either larger than 2Mb, somewhere between 500kb to 2Mb and finally any emails that are larger than 100kb.

Personally this tool is somewhat useful, mainly because Gmail does provide us with so much storage space that it would take a lot of emails to delete before seeing large space savings. Any how if you are running out of space on your Gmail account, do try out this tool. You never know how handy it might turn out to be. Best of all, this service is free!

 

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