Declaring Email Bankruptcy

Email is a scourge on my existence. No, that’s not quite right. Most email is a scourge on my existence. There, that’s better. I’ve had my main email account since 2009. That’s a lot of email. At first, I was writing this post while filtering and deleting my email, but at this point, I am calling mail account bankruptcy and am deleting huge swaths of messages. I’ll keep some recent stuff, some mail that’s important, but basically I’m just nuking most of the account from orbit. But how did we get here? How did we get to where I’m looking at 30,000 messages wondering if there’s something that I will really regret deleting in here?

Gmail, All Mail, and 15GB of “Free Storage”

First, some history. On April 1, 2004, google launched Gmail, a free ad-supported webmail client and service. It was an April Fool’s joke, but like all the best April Fool’s jokes, people actually got something out of it.

Part of Gmail’s whole pitch was that you never have to delete anything ever again. All of your mail will always be there for you in a searchable database with good filtering. Instead of hitting “Delete” you are supposed to hit “Archive” where a message will be removed from the inbox, but it’ll still hang around in an “all mail” view. The reason this was possible was another innovation of Gmail. Every user would get a chunk of free storage for their email. It started small-ish, at 1GB, but as peoples’ accounts aged and email got bigger, with more image attachments and html embedded in the messages, the free storage got bigger. Now, a free Google account will give you 15GB of storage space to be used across Gmail, Google Photos and Google Drive. My 26 years of email alone takes up more than half of that storage allocation.

Now, a modern adage rings true here. If you aren’t paying for the service, you’re the product. It started innocuous enough. Gmail was a loss leader for Google for a while. Eventually to mitigate some of that, Google started selling advertisements for the Gmail inbox view, and of course, your email is available to them to tailor more advertising to you. In the United States, email 180 days old or older is considered abandoned. That means that everything older than 180 days can be accessed by the government without your consent or knowledge. Twenty six years of my life online All the media piracy sites I had accounts on in college. All of the private conversations Facebook sent me emails about when I was younger. The contents of every single package I’ve ever received from Amazon or any other online retailer. All of it is in those 30,000 emails and the vast majority of them are available to the government, and probably advertisers too if I had to guess. It’s time for that to change.

Cleaning up my mess

So, how does one start going about downsizing and categorizing 30,000 messages? Unfortunately, this way leads to madness. The more I filtered, deleted, sorted, filed, and deleted, the more I felt that even the dents I was making weren’t worth it. Any reason I’d gone back to old email was pretty unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. I started with handy search terms that come up often in mail you don’t need. “Do not reply” and “Unubscribe” and such. These led to big numbers of messages getting deleted, and shredding everything from before 2015 helped too, but in the end I’d worked on it for six hours across two sessions and landed at 2,979 emails remaining. I was paging through messages 25 at a time until I saw a company name, searching for that name, and deleting the five or ten messages that showed up.

I was really close. I could feel it, but each message deleted felt more and more like defeat. I didn’t save my mail like this. Not that I really get physical mail worth saving anyway. No, I don’t think it’s worth holding onto these messages just because I can. I’m glad I looked to see what was even in there, but if this is an exercise at all, it should be an exercise in letting go, not organization.

What’s next?

I’m really not quite sure. I want to get away from Gmail eventually if I can justify paying for email, but I think in the meantime, I’ll commit to deleting anything I receive from a company and anything personal will get archived. My overall deadline for deciding on what to do next is in December. By then I have to clear out my Google Drive and Photos accounts because that’s when I am switching from encrypted files stored in Drive to real backup of the home server that’s acting as the local host for all of that anyway.

In any case, I’m hoping my email inbox starts becoming a lot more meaningful as I continue to expand my horizons in the indie web and reach out to other bloggers I like.