Not long I purged my RSS feeds and have been enjoying the reduced mental stress of not having so many unread messages in NetNewsWire.
So I decided to do the same thing with GMail.
As everyone knows, GMail was designed so that you’d never need to delete anything. Well I’d managed to get up to 80% of my total and it seemed like I was gaining a percentage point faster than they are adding capacity.
I thought about signing up for the for-pay version of GMail which gives you 6GB of email but then I wondered:
“Do I really need all this crap?”
See, when I got GMail, I immediately signed up for a bunch of mailing lists. When I switched to Mac, I joined just about every Mac-related mailing list I could find.
If I had a SSH issue, I’d join the SSH list. I was on the Zsh list, the procmail list, the subversion list (despite the fact that I never quite got around to setting up subversion anywhere), AppleScript (despite not having any clue how to write it), and so on and so on.
So last night I went through and deleted all those mailing lists that I don’t really ever read. They aren’t bad lists, I just don’t need to be on them and don’t have time to read them, so why should I be asking them to send me mail I won’t read?
In the purge I found several email lists which have apparently dried up, yet I still had a Label for them with unread messages. Deleted. Special label for a conference I went to in January? Deleted. Special label for someone I was emailing frequently but haven’t for 6 months? Kept the messages, deleted the label.
Did it make a difference?
Compare the start, middle, and end results below:
641MB doesn’t sound like a lot, but the mental difference between 90% and 58% is significant.