3600 email over 15 years? That’s… a rather small amount.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Yeah, I expected tens of thousands like I have.
At work I had 20k emails in two years. What a busy project!
4 years, I have 62k deleted unread items...
I've done that about three or four times over the past 20 years. Sitting down to perform a big major archival move of thousands of emails and sorting through them and trying to preserve them in some kind of way.
Now I manage it by only keeping an active archive of about two years worth of email at time on my account. Once the New Year rolls around, I go into my email account and remove a year's worth of email from the system. For instance this January, I went into my archive and kept in 2026 (current year), 2025 (last year), 2024 (year before that) and then removed 2023. The removed year is just archived in .eml format and kept mostly as text files so they will be easy to search later.
I haven't had a real need to use those archives in all that time. But once in a while, especially if I am searching for an event, a person or a time when something happened, I'll dive into the archives to search for clues that I could follow and they have been helpful a few times. Otherwise, it's just nice to keep it all because once in a while, I just look through them like reading a journal of past events.
That sounds terrible. How much of the kept email was actually valuable stuff you couldn't replace?
If I had to guess, only around 15% or so of that.
I haven't even gone that thoroughly through the boiled down emails just yet, I've just got them sorted out so far.
The other ~85% or so is along the lines of shit like 2 factor authentication, holiday deals, terms of service updates, blah, but are legit emails...
Anything good? I found some old pix in mine
Honestly, not much of interest worth sharing, unless you're interested in my legacy custom and damn near fully loaded Windows XP MCE VirtualBox VM from around 2008...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e2_TdP2HdeOduqfBK1iYReiiUxJ13kQo/
It's like a time capsule of sorts yo, back when LimeWire and BearShare were the thing...
I've done this. I think it's a great way to empower yourself over your email.
My latest system has been that I gave up on labels/categories. I have a 2 inbox system. Anything that I expect to get that I know isn't urgent gets a filter that archives it (skip the inbox) but leaves it unread. Then every couple days I flip through those unread emails and I can blow through them with keyboard shortcuts knowing I'm mostly just scanning and acknowledging them.
I find different categories don't add value because clicking the labels destroys the efficiency of using simple keyboard shortcuts.
Next delete it and move to proton or another service. Fuck Google.
Already on Proton my privacy conscious friend, why you think it took me so long?
But alas, I do still have a Google account, had it since like 2004, so I'm not exactly in a position to completely abandon it anytime in the near future...
Depending on how you think of things, the CEO of Proton has recently been spouting a bunch of MAGA crap, which sucks because I’ve almost been wrapped up in Proton services the way I had been in Google’s. So now I’m moving again to Fastmail.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm trying to degoogle-adjacent because I don't have the mental energy to completely transition over, at least immediately
The biggest thing I want to do is make a backup of my photos. There's a lot I've taken over many years and I'd hate to lose access for some reason. Not that I do anything to warrant it, just heard the horror stories of when it does happen
Oh, that's one thing I've never done, I've never had Google auto-archive my photos on Drive. All my photos are local on my devices. At least I have a 4TB HDD to backup all my stuff to...
You are an inspiration to us all.
I'm glad I was good about cleaning up my Inbox and archive folders regularly.
Not so glad it was spread across two Microsoft and 1 Google account for decades when I went to deGoogle (deAmerican really) and moved to a custom domain name email address.
8 hours manually changing addresses on accounts across the WWW.
It's not too late for those who didn't. If you're efficiently cleaning up your inbox by searching for one source at a time and bulk archiving/deleting, then it doesn't take much longer to go through many more emails.
A lot of providers also include an "unsubscribe" button somewhere which I've found handy. Sometimes their unsubscribe link doesn't work for whatever reason
You are an inspiration
Yeah… me to. But I deleted my account.
do google takeout once in a while in case you get locked out
Hell yeah, brother!
my last trip to a google web property other than yt was to set up the authorization for mailstore years ago. i let that archive everything locally and delete it off the server. i just peek at new stuff every now and then right in mailstore. i never have to send mail out on that address, so it works for me.
So you left Gmail after?
I've been working on switching my other accounts over to Proton, but I've had my Google account since like 2004 or so.
I'm not exactly in a position to completely de-Google myself just yet, but this is a large step in that ultimate direction, eventually...
This is why I use https://port87.com/
I will never have to do that.
Ehh, that amount over 15 years is nothing. I just think about how much I get from legit sources (bank, utilities, insurance, steam forums, etc). I've be way over that amount in just a few years. The amount of true spam I get is very small. I mean like less than 20 a month small. And I use Gmail. I know that over 15 years that would still be several thousand but I should also point out that's what's in my spam folder. The amount of spam that makes it to my inbox is <1 month. I couldn't even calculate it because idk the last time I saw one.