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Comment by njhaveri | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, I think they'll just never increase the free storage again. Eventually, people will get tired of quarterly inbox cleanups and just pay for the extra storage, which is a win-win for them and avoids a serious PR crisis.

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I’m surprised there aren’t some great tools out there that help with this. Seems like a niche to fill as it’s inevitable that peoples free storage hits limits over time.

What about Ctrl + A, Del? I'm only half-joking. How many emails older than 3 months in a mailbox growing beyond GBs are really worth saving? I don't want to sound harsh - that's just how my mailbox looks like.

You're throwing away all your history in doing so. Personally I never want to delete emails from loved ones, which is where most of the storage ends up going anyway.

I agree that genuine exchanges with the people in your life should be kept. As well as anything about purchases, invoices, salary notes etc. But my point is that these days newsletters, spam, notifications, ads, etc. make up a huge part of many people's email traffic.

If you are in the habit of exchanging a large amount of documents and pictures over email, a dedicated storage solution might be more appropriate.

Work-related communication, as in freelancing, might deserve a separate mailbox that is kept clean of unimportant things.

Is your mail box filled by lovely emails rather than newsletters/ads, really? Text emails could take small amount of volume. Maybe many photos are attached?

Newsletters & ads typically link externally to images rather than embed. I would guesstimate less than 10-20% of my storage (not total number of emails) is newsletters.

You’d be surprised. A few days ago it was useful to look back at emails I’d received over a decade ago to work out when and how well some specialist book I’d books had sold.

I look for a 10-year old email every one or two months. The 15-year old ones practically don't ever cross the line.

I know of two.

https://mailstrom.co/

https://clean.email/

Mailstrom seems to be about unsubscribing, as somewhat does clean.email (ironically I find their home page to be the opposite of clean). I'm talking about finding the random 40 meg videos my dad sent me that should have been a YouTube link. Ideally such a tool WOULD find the YouTube link, and edit the email to include that.

You could search gmail emails by operator like larger_than:10mb or such.

You absolutely could as an initial step in a poor man's solution. However, I wouldn't call this a great UX. It means that all the ones I want to keep will continue to appear every time I need to cleanup. That doesn't group by sender, nor does it sorting out YouTube-like forwards from my dad's friends from the actual content my dad has sent.

I could go on and on for what I'd consider a great cleanup experience. It's surprising to me that such a thing doesn't exist, nor is it the kind of thing that's built into Gmail itself. You'd figure they would be best to offer a simple cleanup experience that has sane defaults.

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