Anil Sharma

Gmail box full ! Now what ?

Well, a 7 GB mail box is not enough for some people. My official email ID on Gmail (Google Apps) became full and some mails started bouncing. For the past 5 days, I’ve been struggling with issues probably unknown to many Gmail users. I’m sure many users will reach there some day, so it good to aware.

a) When your mail box becomes full, Gmail doesn’t send you a warning email ! That’s the least you would expect. Instead, it just starts bouncing mails.

b) When your contacts warn you that your mail box is full, what do you do ? You hurriedly log in and start deleting your mails. I deleted about 1000 of mails from inbox, spam and trash, but for next few hours, Gmail kept showing that my box was 99% full and it wouldn’t reduce. After few hours, it automatically reduced to 94%. That means, when you delete messages from trash, Gmail is ‘probably’ storing your mails somewhere else before it deletes from your account. That’s not comfortable to know

c) Ok, so I have 13000 + mails in the inbox. I want to delete say 800 selected ones. How do i do it ? That’s where the pain begins. You see, Gmail was built with the philosophy that users should never be required to delete mails so the options for deleting are very poor. I can’t delete all email that are say more than 3 years old. I can’t list all email by the size of their attachments so I could delete the heavier mails first. I can’t reach emails numbered between say 8000 and 9000 – that’ll take me hours as I have to start and click through pages from the newest or oldest mails.

d) I figure a good way to delete unwanted mails would be to search for mails with a common topic and delete all of them together. Even that’s not smooth. Suppose I search for all mails that have say [forums] in subject line and it shows 200 mails. Now I get 20 pages of such emails. I select the mails in the first page, then I click the option to select all the 200 mails. Now , I don’t want to delete 1 of the 200 mails – but you can’t do that !! The moment you unselect 1, your selection of 200 reduces to just the first out of 20 pages !!
So here I am, staring at the possibility that I might have to spend hours to manually delete mails.
I’ve highlighted these issues to Google also. I’m not criticizing Gmail, I still love it and I think it’s still the best email service.
I’m just hoping somebody somewhere will somehow bring these things to someones notice someday !!

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