To ring in the new year, I decided to finally buckle down and clear out my GMail inbox. I spent a total of 10 minutes and, just by cleaning out old emails, my inbox dropped from a size 16GB to a mere 4GB!
There are more than 650 people at OCTO. If we all do a little inbox maintenance, we can quickly remove dozens of To from Google servers …
Of course, great SaaS tools are available on the market to automatically clean up your inbox but they all require custom authorizations that aren’t necessarily in line with your (or our) company's security policies.
Fear not, there are other clever ways to free up space and lighten your footprint. Just between us, we have a few tips to share to help you painlessly sort through that mountain of old emails and clean house in just a few clicks.
You can either tidy up your inbox on your own or, better yet, you can take a couple extra minutes to prepare personalized criteria for your company that can then be shared with your team.
Below are some quick links that make use of smart sorting filters and save you time in cleaning out your Gmail inbox.
These sorting filters allow you to select anddelete(don’tarchive****) emails you don’t want or need to keep.
All those "no-reply" emails (here the setting’s before June 30-2020 but you can change the period in the search bar)
Then drop the dead weight... Attachments are the largest part of your inbox
The greediest consumers of inbox data storage are media and the files (pptx, prez pdf) sent as attachments. Use these links to see what you’ve got kicking around:
then, when you are happy with your search, just copy the URL of the ‘search results’ page.
The search URL has integrated your search criteria and can now be directly shared with any Gmail user. Nifty!
For example, searching for messages prior to Dec 1-2020 using keywords [my search] or [other search] but excluding [DO NOT DELETE] would show up like this in the search bar:
before:2020-01-01 "my search" OR "other search criteria" -"DO NOT DELETE"
If your Gmail is set to “Conversation Mode”: then when you delete a post from google groups, you also delete private replies that followed a public post.
Remember toDeleteand notArchive the messages that you want to permanently delete from your Gmail.
Afterwards, deleted messages are still accounted for in your storage total as long as they remain in Trash. You’ll have to “Empty Trash” or wait a few days for Gmail to do it on its own. But take care!
—after that, your deleted messages will be gone forever with no way to get them back if you’ve made a mistake.
Be sure of what emails you’re deleting before sending them the way of the dodo. And please remember not to hold us responsible for any errors or faulty manipulations!
Sadly, most of this was emitted when the email was sent...But deleting them still counts!
While we clearly won’t change the world by cleaning out our Gmail mailbox, our own OCTO Carbon Footprint study shows us that every initiative counts. Beyond that, there is another purpose to all this: by visualizing these hoarded GB of obsolete data, we can collectively become aware of our digital usages and of how it impacts the planet.
So beyond deleting our emails, we should also strive to reduce traffic and network usage; to send less data, to fewer people; and, above all, to replace our digital toys a lot less often.
Deleting our emails doesn't always translate into real impact up the chain; while it could technically lead to fewer Google servers and fewer network components (both in terms of consumption and manufacturing), it remains to be proven. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Sure, deleting emails gives you the warm-and-fuzzies and is helpful for the environment, but the real issue lies in rethinking our methods and changing the way we use our devices to become more sustainable at the office, with the ultimate goal of becoming better, greener citizens and workers in 2021.
"Tidying my inbox is cool and all, but my Google Drive seems a bit overweight too. Got any tips to help me sort through those files?"
Google Drive, as you might imagine, is a bit more complicated. It’s not just sorting files but managing the different statuses and rights associated with each Google App folder and file. Unfortunately, GMail’s search operators don’t work in Drive at all.
Google Vault can help but it's mostly used by domain admin for legal backup purposes.
For starters, you can:
Sort your Google Drive files par size = https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota(if necessary, click on “Size" at the top to display files from largest to smallest)
