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date 2010-0-17
tags index
permalink how-to-fix-an-overwhelmed-gmail-accout.html
title How to fix an overwhelmed Gmail Accout

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I have used the same Gmail address as my main email for over 5 years. Since then:

- I've made dozens of other emails that forward to this address.
- I've signed up for hundreds of web apps and newsletters.

As a result, my Gmail account gets inundated with email. Here are the stats:

- 16,054 unread emails in my inbox
- 29,236 emails total in my inbox
- ?? who knows how many total emails in my archive
- 3.683 GB of email
- Using 49% of my Gmail quota

My Gmail account had become a firehose.

This was bad for two reasons.

First, I started missing important emails. Not many, but a few per month. I had to write my own <a href="http://github.com/breck7/checkmygmail/">simple Bayes filter</a> to find them.

Second, I couldn't do what most people do: use my inbox as a "todo" list. Most people immediately archive or delete an email when they're done with it. This is a great organizational trick. I wanted to do this again.

I considered starting a new email address and giving it out to important people, but that seemed like it would make my life more complex.

As it turns out, the solution was simple.

- Started liberally using the "Spam" button. I started clicking Spam on pretty much any type of mass email that wasn't very interesting to me. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
- Starred all the recent messages that I still had to deal with.
- Archived all 29,000+ of my gmail messages at once.
- Went back to the starred folder and moved the important messages to inbox.

# Notes
1. Thanks to this site for telling me how to <a href="http://www.supriyadisw.net/2008/04/how-to-archive-all-your-gmail-messages">archive all my gmail messages</a>.

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