>How to avoid running out of space on Gmail
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Danny Sullivan found himself in a rare predicament: he ran out of space on his Gmail account, and had to jump through all sorts of hoops to delete old, useless messages and free some space up.
As Danny points out, this rather goes against the Google promise that you never need to delete an email ever again.
Indeed, Google makes a point of encouraging people not to delete. Although there’s a delete button in the Gmail interface now, there wasn’t for a long time. Google much prefers it if you archive, rather than delete.
But I delete all the time. I delete a lot of stuff, and I always have done, because I don’t want to get into the same position that Danny found himself in.
My simple rule is this: I don’t keep anything that’s archived elsewhere.
So, all mailing list traffic gets binned. Each list has an archive on the web, so I can search that for old messages if necessary. Similarly, notifications from web services all get binned. Once I’m notified, there’s no need for me to keep them. News alerts, new Twitter followers, calendar reminders, Facebook updates, Flickr comments, all of that – it all gets trashed.
The only stuff I keep is stuff that I actually need to: messages that were sent to me, and contain things that are not going to be archived anywhere else.
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