#TechTipTuesday - Cleaning out Digital Clutter Gmail edition

Look, digital hoarding is just too easy these days, however, eventually we all run out of space in the digital void so with out further ado let's dive head first into the mess that can be (and is my) Gmail Inbox.

While most emails do not take up that many GB of space, you can easily amass many emails with plenty of them having attachments, photos, pdf's etc. With all those attachments your email storage limits begin to run out. So the easiest first step to clearing out those old emails that are taking up space is to open Gmail on your web browser,

Once your inbox loads enter the following in the search box at the top of the screen (without the parenthesis) 

"has:attachment larger:10M"

Then hit enter. 

This will then show you all of the emails that have attachments larger than 10 megabytes. You can of course change the number 10 to be whatever you want it to be, however when you are looking to clear house, 10 is a good place to start.

Once you have done that you can do one of two things. 

Rip that bandaid off! OR You can slowly peel it away.

If you are just ready to clean house, then click the box at the top which will then select all of the emails at once then press DELETE (or the little trash bin)

This will relocate all of the selected emails on that page to your trash bin. Which means you are still housing them and they are still taking up space. 

Repeat this process until you have gone through all of the emails you are wanting to delete.

IF you would rather slowly peel that bandaid off, then you can scour over the emails that have attachments and make sure you have saved the images or attachments before you delete them.

Now once you have dropped those emails into the trash...it's time to empty that bin.

Click on the trash folder and click Empty Trash Bin

Now while this is a great first step, if you are like me, you still have loads of emails to sort through, so take a deep breath and stay tuned to next week's Tech Tip to continue to learn how to get this digital clutter under control...we can do this...