Do you just let emails pile up? I use 159mb on Gmail, inbox always cleared, important emails (billing, account stuff, etc.) put into "starred"
Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup
#12Do you just let emails pile up? I use 159mb on Gmail, inbox always cleared, important emails (billing, account stuff, etc.) put into "starred"
I'm like you (in fact I delete everything after looking at it, effectively only storing what's quoted in my sent box) but yes I think most people do just let emails pile up, from what I've seen whenever I catch a glimpse of anyone else's inbox. They get emails that they don't want and never open, but also don't bother to delete them or unsubscribe until they hit a storage limit.
I do love the elegance of searching with the "unsubscribe" keyword, but it doesn't solve the problem of the inbox filling up with junk again. I wonder how dangerous it would be to put in place a filter rule that deletes anything received with that keyword. I think the next most common phrase is "manage your email preferences" or "communication preferences." I'm curious to search my wife's Gmail inbox with these terms to see the precision and recall for myself.
Re: Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a subscription to Google One (which is what you mean; Google Workspaces isn't a subscription, it's a suite of apps.) It has some good perks. I am, however, petrified of going over the "free tier" storage limit, because if I do lose, or cancel, that One membership, then my Gmail will be completely disabled until I can bail out enough storage to go back under the 15GiB again. I think that's an extremely undesira…
Do you know whether it's possible to prepay / pay for advance for a subscription?
For a personal Google One subscription, prepayment is definitely not available. You can be billed monthly or annually. Naturally, this is "pay in advance" so if you pay on October 1, your subscription lasts through October 31.
A few months ago, I canceled my subscription, and when I tried to re-enable autopay for it, I found that I could not, even though banner messages claimed I could. It turned out that I could not, in fact, re-subscribe until after the subscription had lapsed on its expiration day! I had no trouble doing that, and now, autopay is re-enabled for next year, but it sure was stress-inducing to just watch it expire.
Re: Tell HN: Easy and Effective Gmail Cleanup
#14Do you just let emails pile up? I use 159mb on Gmail, inbox always cleared, important emails (billing, account stuff, etc.) put into "starred"
I'm like you (in fact I delete everything after looking at it, effectively only storing what's quoted in my sent box) but yes I think most people do just let emails pile up, from what I've seen whenever I catch a glimpse of anyone else's inbox. They get emails that they don't want and never open, but also don't bother to delete them or unsubscribe until they hit a storage limit. I do love the elegance of searching wi…
Once I wiped my account of marketing emails, the new ones that came in were glaringly obvious, and I unsubscribed from each one as they came in.
Gmail has a nice unsubscribe feature that another poster linked to an article about. It’s as easy as tapping the … menu and selecting Unsubscribe in the iOS app. It worked well for almost all of my unwanted subscriptions.
I am now deleting all unwanted email and maintaining a clean inbox with close to zero effort.