The firm also now recommends using MS Outlook on your computer, as opposed to using the simple online interface we had in Google. Microsoft Exchange Online will also offer an online interface. However, some of the other systems the firm is adopting need to use the good old fashioned Outlook program on your computer. Unlike more modern web based email, Outlook performance will be impacted by having particularly large mailboxes. This is another reason to remove the bloat.
A third reason for cleanup is that our migration from Google to Microsoft will go much faster and more smoothly the smaller the mailboxes are than we need to move. So if at all possible, please clean out your mailboxes.
Search Your Archives:
First, look for archived emails. Many mail programs, particularly on your phones, have often archived mail that you thought you were deleting. You may want to check and see if this is the case, by looking for archived mail in your mailbox.
To search only for archived email, run the following search in the Gmail search bar:
has:nouserlabels -in:Sent -in:Chat -in:Draft -in:Inbox
Be careful though, if you have "conversation view" turned on, you may still see some email that is not archived as Google will show you all conversations in which any one message within that conversation was archived. Select the messages you want and delete them.
Search for Large Attachments
Most individual emails take up almost no space. A plain text message is usually less than 5kb in size. You could save millions of them and never fill your mailbox. What takes up your space are large attachments and pictures. Google allows for attachments of up to 25 MB in size. A mere forty emails like this would use up 1 GB of storage space. A single email with a 20 MB attachment takes up as much space as 10,000 short text emails of 2 KB each.
To search for these particularly large emails, I recommend doing a search by mail size. For example, if I wanted to search for all of my emails larger than 20 MB, I would run the following search in the Gmail search bar:
larger:20m
I recommend searching for 20 MB and larger files. If you don't find very many search for larger:15m, or larger10m, or even larger 5m to see all the larger files. Delete those you do not need.
Search for older messages
Some of us have email messages going back decades. Many of these may be for closed cases that we never want to review again, or maybe just old notes about going to lunch or taking a personal day back in 2003. You can look for older messages by using the following search in Gmail:
Older_than:10y
That would show you all messages older than 10 years. You could, of course change it to search for mail older than 5 years with: Older_than:5y.
You can also search by date. For example, if your wanted to find anything sent or received before January 15, 2010, you would run the following search:
Before:2010/01/15
Specific Senders:
Perhaps you get mail from someone you are sure you never want to see again. This is a great way to isolate all that junk mail from Amazon.com or linkedin.com
You can search for certain senders. For example, if you wanted to search for every message you received from linkedin.com, you would search for:
from:linkedin.com
This will only show you emails from that domain, not emails in which you happened to reference the domain in the text of your email.
Another good trick is to search for:
from:noreply
A great many junk mail senders use "noreply" in their from address. This is a quick and easy way to find and delete them.
Combination Searches
You can run any of the above searches in combination with each other. For example, if you want to see all emails larger than 10 MB and older than 3 years, you would search:
larger:10m AND older_than:3y
Deleting Mail:
Once you have your search results, you must select all the messages and then click on trash to send them to trash. Your page shows you only a limited number at a time. The default is 50 messages, while the maximum you can see on one page is 100 messages.
However, if you are really sure you want to delete all the messages you have found in your search, and don't want to look at the whole list, you can do the following:
Click on the box just above the list to select all the messages on that page. When you do, another line will appear just above the first checked message. It says: "All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search." If you click on the underlined part, it will select all emails that match your search on subsequent pages without you having to scroll through each page. Once you have selected the messages, simply click on the trash can icon to delete everything.
Remove Labels
Although multiple labels do not increase the space you use in Google, Microsoft does not allow you add more than one label to an email. If you have assigned multiple labels to an email, our migration process will duplicate the email so that it can be stored in multiple folders. This doubles the amount of space each email takes (or triples if you have three labels on one email).
If possible, you may want to consider removing multiple labels from emails. You will not be able to use multiple labels going forward. Removing them from existing emails will help reduce your footprint.
Empty Your Trash and Spam:
Now I know this advice goes directly against what I have been telling everyone for years. When you delete something, it sits in your trash for 30 days, then disappears forever. I have long strongly recommend you allow everything to sit in trash for 30 days before it goes away. Once it is gone from trash, you cannot recover it.
However, in this case, I must ask that you empty your trash. If not, the migration tool will pull over all the messages you put in trash, thus defeating the purpose of cleaning up you mailbox. Just please, please, PLEASE, make sure you really want all those messages to disappear forever before emptying trash.
While you are at it, if your mailbox is like mine and has thousands of messages in your spam folder, you may want to empty that as well. Google deletes spam after 30 days, but there may be thousands of spam messages in there every little bit helps in reducing the load for migration.
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