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If you swipe on an inbound email and send it to "archive" (which is the default in the app), it doesn't get deleted even though you can't see it in the Inbox. Instead, it remains in your account, and only shows up in searches - not in any folders.
Maybe to some people this was all perfectly obvious but I didn't understand it. There were *hundreds* of useless emails (Gumtree auto notifications from a decade ago, newsletters and the like) in my account, which Google is pushing me to upgrade to a paid account because it's too full. Ive just deleted 700 emails or so in about 15 mins.
There must be billions of emails sitting on Gmail servers that no-one will ever read or want or miss if they were deleted...
TBF 27gb of free mailbox is quite a lot, even mine which is from (oldest email) 2007 is only 27% full. I've never swiped though, always deleted. Though you right there must be a lot of wasted space on those servers
but for me... it like to hide "some" but not all replies in the "all mail" mailbox too not the main inbox, why ffs????
I only got 15GB of free storage on my Google account (inc photos, where I am sure there is a lot of crap too). How did you get 27gb...?
I used thunderbird to group all my emails then delete them.
I only got 15GB of free storage on my Google account (inc photos, where I am sure there is a lot of crap too). How did you get 27gb...?
Wasn't there a time when Google offered extra free storage for signing up to services? Like, Google+ (Google's Facebook wannabe) and suchlike. Mine's 17GB.
TBF 27gb of free mailbox is quite a lot,
how do you get 27gb? I've only got 15. I thought I'd cleared out old emails but I've got my first 'let's see how this works' from 2004. I'm guessing I only deleted stuff with large attachments. (and I'm 32.5k emails using 76% right now - and getting warnings).
Your storage is shared across all your google services I think, so all the stuff I've got in Drive eats it up as well.
Googles original principle was that you'd have enough space never to need to delete anything so by default when you deleted it added a label and you could still see it in all mail I think. Since I use it across various apple devices and following the auto set up often didn't work properly I've just checked and I've currently got an [imap]/archive and drafts plus a Junk and Sent messages 'labels' a well as a Spam, bin and sent. I've had to delete loads of dupe bins and things over the years when some device decided it didn't want to quite follow the same nomenclature as the others.
Left to Archive, Right to Delete. What do you mean by "default"?
I only got 15GB of free storage on my Google account (inc photos, where I am sure there is a lot of crap too). How did you get 27gb...?
Umm I wasn't aware it was larger than normal, I really have no idea how mine is bigger than yours 😉
Must have just been what they offered when I signed up & only the free service
His thumb "defaults" to tinder muscle memory.
Nothing to see here.
I have 100Gb but then I pay £1.59 a month for some storage/backup package so possible that increases it.
12Gb used but around 10 of that is pics.
Even if you delete and don't archive, they still hang around in the default tags like 'important' and 'all mail' - I've tired so many times to remove these and actually get deleted items to properly delete.
I'm mildly amused that the OP's definition of archive is the same as Boris Johnson's was for the Covid messages.
There's a carbon cost to storing all those emails in the cloud roo. I started unsubscribing from a lot of marketing emails.
I've been a Gmail user since very early on, so I can't remember if I changed this. But it's really easy to do.
Didn't realise, but on my phone's Gmail app, swipe left and swipe right are both 'archive'. I don't normally use my phone to read emails, so it's not my default action.. but yeah a bit crap.
Just went into Settings>general settings and changed it.
Been with Gmail since it first became available and have something like 36000 messages in there. I'm a bit of a hoarder 😐
There's a carbon cost to storing all those emails in the cloud roo. I started unsubscribing from a lot of marketing emails.
Just struck me would be a good thing to set up a smart rule for - apple mail (and google) identify stuff that's from mailing lists now. Having a rule that deletes all those mails automatically after a time period (Year? month? less) would clear an awful lot of junk.
This thread reminded me to sort this out. So, a bit of Googling and 45000 deleted emails later, I have over 5gb of storage back...
There's a carbon cost to storing all those emails in the cloud roo. I started unsubscribing from a lot of marketing emails.
the word 'cloud' sounds so innocent doesnt it. Just floating around in the aether. It doesn't paint the same picture as words like 'warehiuse' 'factory' or 'quarry' or 'spoil heap'
By the same token though it think it is pretty clear what 'archive' means. By that I'm pretty sure the people who empty my bins aren't librarians 🙂
A pretty large percentage of 'the internet' - all those data centres etc - are basically storing single-use files (or rather multiple copies of those files for back up purposes) - emails, attachments, photos etc, that will only be looked at once or perhaps even never
Slight tangent but...
I have a number of folders set up in gmail. I move important emails into those. They stick around for a few days but then after a while they disappear. But if look in the archive there they are and i have to move them back. Any ideas??
Disable auto-archive? 🤷♂️
Are your folders inside another folder? The last time I saw something like this, someone had created an entire folder structure inside Deleted Items for all her importantest emails and then kicked off when all her mail disappeared during a periodic system-wide purge.