I’ve been getting notices from gmail for a while now, informing me, oh so politely, that I am getting close to my storage limit, and would I like to purchase more storage now or later?
Keeping a clean inbox has not been a priority for me in the last… ten years or so. Maybe twelve. So I finally started clearing things out. I started with the social folder, full of Twitter updates that I rarely glance at and even more rarely click through. Purged that completely. Then I purged the promotions folder. That was harder, because there’s a part of me that always wonders about saving something for future use. But I did it. Bye bye all you old promotions.
Of course, the promotions section is a relatively new feature. So, my original inbox still has a ton of “promotions” related emails, especially in the older section. Oh, yes, to give some context, I was over 17,000 unread emails in my Inbox, and there were even more unread in the promotions folder. Inbox Zero is not my style.
I was reluctant to wholesale delete even old emails in the main inbox, and so I have been going through them, oldest to newest, 100 emails at a time, to make sure I only delete crap like old receipts and adverts, and keep the good stuff like pictures of my nieces. It’s a slow process, but I made more progress than I thought I would in just half an hour, so it’s not hopeless. And it will give me the breathing space to rearrange things. See, I need to move this blog onto my website, and then I’ll be hosting all the photos over there instead of inside my gmail account. That’s another one of those things that is going to take a large investment of concentrated effort, but that will pay off in the long run.
I just need to carve out the time to actually get that done, and then put a redirect post here and boom! No more uploading pictures to my gmail account in order to post them. Instead, I’ll start putting pressure on the storage limits of the website 😀