How to clean out Gmail
11:20 am September 8th, 2008 by Sal Cangeloso
It’s scary how fast those 7+ GB can fill up. Need to make some room in your Gmail account without spending all day? Here is your best friend in the question for a cleaner Gmail account. Just search for:
has:attachment filename:*.doc
This is a pretty inefficient filetype, so you get some serious bloat. As far as my inbox goes, these are generally the worst offenders. I go back in my email history to when there was a conference and I was being pounded with press releases and space clears up pretty quickly…
Next up is:
has:attachment filename:*.jpg
but only if this is your work email account as you probably won’t want to delete images from your buddies. Images tend to come in groups and they tend to be large (most of the ones sent to me are ready for print). JPG is more effective than GIF because people often use GIFs in their footers/signatures (for HTML emails) so a search for GIFs will turn up way too many emails that have only 3K or 5K attachments.
has:attachment filename:*.zip
This can be incredibly effective as these tend to be larger file, but I don’t check for them very often as I don’t get sent many zip/rar files any more.
After all that, empty the trash and see how well you did. In the last 15 minutes or so I cleared up 2% of my total holdings. It wasn’t enough to make a huge difference (I was pretty conservative about what was deleted) but I find that by doing some light housekeeping once a month it keeps my account from filling up.
