When You Really Must Delete Google Mail

Most Sciencetext readers know they can use their Google Mail, GMail account as a virtual hard drive. It is not something that Google itself advocates or really even discusses. GMail is supposed to be for email, hence the suffix “Mail”. But when you open the GMail homepage it does tell you, that you have “Over 2861.927677 megabytes (and counting) of free storage”, at least that is the ascending figure I saw when I wrote this post.

Anyway, I use GMail heavily, have a few files stored on there using the “hard drive” tip, and this morning when I logged in, it told me my mailbox was 99% full! So, what am I to do? “You will never need to delete another message.” That’s Google’s claim. Okay, fair cop, I could perhaps archive some of those files elsewhere, but even if I were to remove them all, I get a lot of big attachments (more on sending and receiving 500 Mb emails here), so even with regular decluttering my Google box consistently tweaks the 99% meter.

I am not alone, Brett Jackson has suffered the same problem, and I am guessing that a fair few Sciencetext readers are also wondering what happens when that 99% clicks over to 100%.

Well, I just don’t know. Maybe at this point you simply have to break Google Mail’s promise to you and delete some of those messages. However, if we can raise awareness of this issue we might persuade Google en masse to go the way of Yahoo! and offer unlimited storage, what do you think, is it possible we could move the Giant?

Meanwhile, did I just say unlimited storage on Yahoo Mail? Does anyone have a hack to make your Yahoo email account into a virtual hard drive?