Comments on: Pondering “Email Conservation” After Hitting Gmail’s Storage Limit

By: Raju Krishnan

Raju Krishnan — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:42:25 +0000

I have managed to find a work around

1. Create a new Gmail id
2. Keep some space free in your old id by deleting unwanted mails.
3. Forward all incoming messages to the new id using a filter and immediately delete from the new id.
4. Go to your new mail id and – go to settings-Accounts & Import-Send mail as and configure your old gmail id.
5. This way any mail going from your new id will continue to be received by the other party in the old id and when you continue to receive mail in the old id which is automatically forwarded to your new id.
6. For some time it is a problem if you have to refer to some old conversation
7. To overcome this, I keep my old gmail and my new one opened together using 2 different browsers. (IE and Chrome)

Hope this was helpful to some of you.

regards
raju

By: Ranjit

Ranjit — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:55:31 +0000

Thanks Dave!
I finally bought 20 GB extra space from Google. The price factor $5/yr for 20 gig seemed attractive as well…

I did a Thunderbird backup from gmail already, but haven’t been able to get all my mails yet. Somehow it keeps on saying Inbox Full, etc..

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:42:02 +0000

Sorry I'm a bit late to this party, but you might want to check out IMAPSize (Windows only, article about it here). Haven't tried it yet myself but could be useful. It allows searching the IMAP tree for attachments over a certain size, downloading a local copy, removing attachments but leaving message bodies intact (so you can still search in GMail) and doing full account backups. Cheers, Dave.

By: Ranjit

Ranjit — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:51:46 +0000

I hit over-quota about 2 months ago! And then I realised how much of “un-important”, “newsletters”, “notifications”, etc I had piled up over the last few years. It is very easy for me to pay and upgrade; but somehow I am telling myself to enjoy this challenge And really get selective about what you keep! Afterall, we don’t wanna keep everything in our house forever… We sure do want to trash stuff or move them out (aka ‘yard sale’)… Almost every 2 days, I hit the limit saying I am OVER 99.xxx%! And I am trying to see how long I can continue like this… I am thinking something different as well – (1) Open a Second gmail account and “Forward” all heavy emails to that account, and delete all forwarded emails from the current account. I bet you, you can see the results just in ONE hour! In 1 hour you will have freed up Almost a gig of space or maybe more… This again takes us back to a feature for “Sort by Size”. I have always wondered if there would ever be a feature where you could select multiple emails and forward them at one go! ) Seems too much to ask for, but yeah its not that difficult to write a program that does this. By far Google’s email search is the best and the fastest – This is ONE BIG reason I am hooked up!

I also have a question though – When I purchase additional storage, let’s say 10GB, is this storage over and above the 7.3GB that I am using (so the total would be 7.3 + 10 = 17.3 GB)? or is it like just TOTAL 10GB? Anyone has an answer to this? Thanks!

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:47:23 +0000

Foobar, I’ve edited your profanity down for others who don’t want to see it.

Instead of shouting, perhaps next time you’ll actually read something before commenting. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t have an issue with Gmail overall. Love the service. Think it’s great. Simply couldn’t upgrade to use more space due to a problem on their end and so pondered ALL the mail we get from ALL sources as a general problem.

By: Foobar

Foobar — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:01:33 +0000

Go f* yourself out of GMAIL. Who the f* told you to use the fucking gmail. Instead of shouting, and abasing gmail, go and f* your trash.

By: TJ

TJ — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:28:55 +0000

I’m running out of space too and this is on a 25 GB Google Apps Premier account. I have a few months before I completely run out of space.

The horrible thing about this is that I CANNOT purchase additional space. If you’re on Google Apps you can’t just buy additional space like you can on a regular Gmail account.

Anybody have any ideas what to do in this case? Or any knowledge of whether Google will be upping the limits anytime soon?…

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:53:05 +0000

Problem solved when I just make time to upgrade my account and pay for more storage. I have three other family accounts that are on the same domain. There’s no need for me to upgrade and pay for them as well. So I just need a quiet moment to move that out.

The Thunderbird option sounds nice. I’m not shrugging it off. I just have thing working OK at the moment that I don’t need to go through the hassle of downloading a client, doing the setup, etc. If you don’t want to pay for more space, that might be an excellent way to sort by size.

It would still be better if Google just provided this themselves, of course. It shouldn’t be that hard to do.

I’ve also spoken with Gmail folks at Google, and suffice to say, I don’t think they viewed this post as whiny or anti-Google. Rather, I’m just noting some improvements I think the should consider. Like I said, I’m happy to pay. I would have paid when the problem first came up — I was simply unable to because of an error on Google’s end. Then it just was fun and interesting to study it more.

By: JC

JC — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:47:52 +0000

Someone (Jason) mentioned you could use an IMAP client and sort by biggest messages. Problem solved? No–because you said Outlook is choking on the number of messages you have.

Someone else (Hari) mentioned you could use another client (mentioning Thunderbird) which can handle the number of messages you have and then you could sort by size and delete. Problem solved? No–because you said you don’t actually want to delete many of those big messages.

You said in your post that you want a way to sort via size to help determine what to delete (pleading with Google to add it) and Hari gives you a way to do it and you shrug it off with a response I interpreted as basically “nah…it’s not too useful to me.” Am I misunderstanding your response? Didn’t Hari give you a solution? What did I miss here? Those are real questions, not a rhetorical ones, since I can picture myself “being in your shoes” someday.

By: Andrew Hyde

Andrew Hyde — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:35:07 +0000

I’ve hit the limit, twice.

1/2 through on my third. Sort by size would be very helpful!