The clearing continues
Jan. 30th, 2026 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
christopher575While I was busily saving my old TikTok videos yesterday so I could delete my account there, I got an email to my primary account from my old primary account, saying my gmail storage was 84% full. That got me thinking about how I don't really need anything from my original gmail account at all. I still use that address as my primary email, but since 2022, all my emails have forwarded from it to an Outlook inbox on our home domain. And for a long time before that, we used Google instead of Microsoft products, so my gmail inbox that bears the same name as my Outlook one has many years of messages up until that day in 2022 when we switched over to Outlook. It was April 21, I just checked.
It takes a whole lot of email to fill up a gmail account, but I spent a lot of years emailing a group of friends all day, every day. While a lot of us are still friends, the last version of the group fizzled out a couple of years ago, but it was a good 20+ year run. The gmail philosophy is to archive instead of delete, so I had tens of thousands of conversations in there, as well as google chats from back when I used it. It was wild to see little glimpses of all of that going by on the screen as page after page of emails were permanently removed.
But there was really no reason to keep it around. In spite of what Google tried to make everyone think, if an email is one you want to keep, it shouldn't be stored in a repository with everything else. Otherwise, how do you know what to keep when it's time to delete some? That's really why they did that, because they want to sell storage to people they've trained to keep everything. It ain't me, babe. These days, I have a folder for things I think I'll need to see at some point and I'll keep indefinitely. And for things I order online, I have a folder for email notifications regarding those orders, and they get deleted once I have the item. And I don't bother putting orders from major sites like Amazon and eBay in there.
I keep some documents on Google Drive and don't really need to move them. Especially now that I got that account so empty it shows as 0% full.
It takes a whole lot of email to fill up a gmail account, but I spent a lot of years emailing a group of friends all day, every day. While a lot of us are still friends, the last version of the group fizzled out a couple of years ago, but it was a good 20+ year run. The gmail philosophy is to archive instead of delete, so I had tens of thousands of conversations in there, as well as google chats from back when I used it. It was wild to see little glimpses of all of that going by on the screen as page after page of emails were permanently removed.
But there was really no reason to keep it around. In spite of what Google tried to make everyone think, if an email is one you want to keep, it shouldn't be stored in a repository with everything else. Otherwise, how do you know what to keep when it's time to delete some? That's really why they did that, because they want to sell storage to people they've trained to keep everything. It ain't me, babe. These days, I have a folder for things I think I'll need to see at some point and I'll keep indefinitely. And for things I order online, I have a folder for email notifications regarding those orders, and they get deleted once I have the item. And I don't bother putting orders from major sites like Amazon and eBay in there.
I keep some documents on Google Drive and don't really need to move them. Especially now that I got that account so empty it shows as 0% full.
