Cleaning Up the Inbox

I decided this day is worth marking in the calendar: since I recently took my data back from Google — which means I already have a backup of my mailbox — the time has come to get rid of those old emails that have been sitting there for years.

Google, with its Gmail, promotes the idea of “never deleting email at all” — and that is, to some extent, convenient and makes sense given the unlimited mailbox size.

But over time you realize it is just accumulated ballast of junk, gigabytes of which are not worth dragging around. And when you do search for something in your mail, that junk (newsletters, notifications, etc.) somehow always ends up in the results.

So starting today I am changing my approach to emails (both Gmail and work ones): any notifications and other trash — delete immediately.

Spent a couple of hours sorting and throwing out the old garbage, which produced this interesting little table (showing the top 3):

and deleted 30389 emails in total. I am sure that sooner or later I will need something from what was deleted, so I will have to dig into the archive. But for now — some relief.