Quick GMAIL Tip from Mr. IT

If your GMAIL account is starting to reach its 7 or 8GB quota there are couple quick things you can do to fix that.  GMAIL has a lot of search options built in, and once you know what they are they become very helpful.  Here's a link to all the search keywords: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190.  I'm only going to give you a couple related to finding large emails.

Ok first, GMAIL gives you a search field that is very useful (much like its Daddy google.com) for finding anything you are looking for, you just need to know what you are looking for.  If you know you have one person that always sends you huge files and forward, start your search with them, type their name into the search field and look for everything that comes up.  If you know its garbage and you've already seen it a million times, just delete it, don't be a Cyber PackRat.  But if possibly what the send you are files that you treasure and want on your computer but don't really need to access them via the web, open the emails and save the files to your PC. GMAIL even gives you an option to "Save All Attachments" for emails with multiple attachments. Save Attachments -> Delete Email -> Empty Trash then watch your percentage of used space go down.

Secondly, if its not that easy you will need to try one of the following searches:

1. has:attachment - this is the most general of the searches, not all attachments are space hoggers
2. filename:(avi OR mov OR mpg OR mpeg OR mp4) - this one will find any emails with video file attachments in your inbox. You can probably tell by the subject lines if you need hold on to any of these, so start checking the selection box and deleting, this will free up a lot of space
3. filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) - this search will find the emails that have pictures attached to them. Now if its just one or two pictures it probably won't be a big deal.  But if someone sent you 5 or more pictures attached to an email that can end up being a large email, especially since pictures now a days can average from 2-5MB a piece.  "Save All Attachments" then delete the email.  Or if its just one of those emails with a lot of pictures like "the people of Walmart" emails just delete it, its only funny the first time...
4. filename:(pdf OR doc OR xls OR ppt) - I didn't really do this one because most documents that are in my GMAIL are generally important, but this might help some of you out a lil.  You could also do a shorter version of this (filename:ppt) since often times people who send forwards have inspirational or silly forwards that have PowerPoint documents attached.  Remember Google also gives you a Google Docs account with your Google/GMAIL account, it might be helpful for you to click "View" under the document name and open then save it to your Google Docs account, that way you can just delete the email but the file is still saved to "the CLOUD" so that you can access it anywhere.

After you are done with those go to your Trash then click the link to "Empty Trash Now".  Now you have done some Spring (or whatever season it is) Cleaning and you inbox should feel much lighter already! I lost 20% when I did this and I generally delete a lot of forwards so I'm sure some of you will lose a lot more!

If this didn't help you, you could also activate IMAP in your GMAIL then set up your account in the desktop app on your machine (Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc..).  Go to Settings and make the changes you see below then go to GMAIL's instructions on how to set up IMAP mail in your mail client.

Muting Virtual Life...

Recently I "lost" a conversation in my gmail as I was actively responding back and forth with someone.  I thought it was the weirdest thing but it appears that I triggered GMAIL's muting function which seems like it could become very helpful for certain conversations.  If you find yourself in an email with a lot of people in it that turns into a "Reply-All" forum and the emails are flooding your inbox without you having an interest in whats being said or joining in on the conversation, mute it.  Come back to it later if you want.  But at least you won't get anymore notifications for it.  I don't have much use for it right now, but knowing that its an option might make me use it in some situations.

Then I started to think about some of the other social networks that I use that give you the option to mute conversations or people.  Facebook, if you add a friend from High School or College that you really don't care about what they have to say day to day, Mute them, they no longer show up on your timeline.  Sweet! I have 600+ friends, best believe a good number of them are muted.  Why not just delete them right? Nah...some of them I'm cool with, but I'm not really concerned with their 35 status updates a day.  At that rate they are blocking out the people I'm actually closer to that may only update once a day or once a week.

Google Buzz also has a mute feature, its practically the same as the GMail feature.  With Buzz it comes in handy if you decide to reply to something, that you didn't expect would start a conversation for a week. Mute! No more emails or notifications with senseless responses.  Facebook should do that too, for when people reply to statuses or to pictures and they really don't care what other people are replying to it.

Finally my favorite Twitter application (one of the things I miss from my Blackberry days), Ubertwitter came out with a mute function.  This one is for the people on your timeline that have 50 updates an hour and it really doesn't interest or entertain you.  Instead of hurting their feelings and deleting them as a friend, just click mute. The other nice feature is that you can choose how long you want to mute someone for.  I guess that comes in handy if you don't want to hear people tweet every 2 minutes when Real House Wives of Atlanta, Greys Anatomy, True Blood, or whatever Award Show is on.  Just mute them for an hour or two and you can still read your timeline with out the bombardment. (you should definitely click that link, lol)

While social networks have seemingly taken over, people are starting to regret being SO connected to everyone all the time.  As time goes on Mute will become a favorite of a lot of people and I'm sure Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else is popular will continue to add filter functions to make using their site more comfy to the user that doesn't want to know everything or show everything...

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47787