Illustration: John Cuneo"With more than 2,500 megabytes of free storage, you never need to throw messages away," says a Gmail help page. "You never know when you might need to see a message again. So why delete it?"
Well, here's a reason: My personal allotment of that free storage (now officially up to 2877MB) filled to the brim the other day. I discovered this circumstance only when friends and colleagues began phoning to ask why their messages to me were bouncing back to their inboxes.
It's true that, as the target of PR geniuses who think my technology beat includes electric can openers shaped like Homer Simpson, I get plenty of mail. But so do lots of people. In other words, as so often happens in the world of storage, enough isn't enough. And free lunches that at first seem wonderful have a way of souring, bringing to mind that old adage about getting what you pay for.
When I opened my Gmail account at the beginning of 2006, it appeared perfect for what I had in mind, which was to have a simple way of reading e-mail on my Treo phone. The idea seemed genius threefold: I'd avoid wasting the phone's precious storage space, I'd get Gmail's potent spam protection, and I could pull up any message fast when I was on the road.
It took me just 5 minutes to set things up so incoming mail would forward to Gmail from my ISP's server. When I was out and about and forgot which hotel my next meeting was in, I simply logged on to Gmail from the phone's Web browser and searched for a quick answer. Spam? Minimized. Maintenance? Nonexistent. And the mobile version of Gmail didn't even display any ads with the messages.
Everything went swimmingly for months. And then my inbox filled up, forcing me to make some room.
First I whacked spam. Gmail holds 30 days' worth in your Spam folder--in my case maybe 9000 messages--unless you purge the junk manually. Since I couldn't tell Gmail to automatically dump spam at a faster pace, I had to play janitor.
Google periodically increases your storage total, but clearly the junk would come faster than the extra bytes, so I had to jettison some genuine mail to avoid repeated overflow. The easiest way would be to sort the mail by size to whack big image files from flacks who thought I'd be interested in a press release with a 20MB smiling head shot of their client's new stockroom clerk attached.
But unlike all desktop e-mail clients and some Web ones, Gmail doesn't let you sort your messages--just search them. I had to page through the inbox, find correspondents whose messages could safely disappear, search for their names, and then delete what turned up, hoping the search didn't inadvertently snag stuff I really wanted to keep. Gmail's limitations forced me to violate the pristine integrity of the keep-everything model that I endorse and that Google rightly promotes--but doesn't quite permit.
Faced with all this, I considered a switch to Yahoo Mail's "unlimited" storage, but feared that the vague "anti-abuse controls" mentioned on its site might someday take the "un-" out. Besides, all that mail already in Gmail made a powerful argument for staying put. Then I got lucky: As I was finishing this column, Google suddenly began offering upgrade plans beginning at $20 per year for 6 extra gigabytes. Not quite in the nick of time and not exactly free, but I'll take it.
I should have learned the key lesson long ago: "Lots of storage" never is. And in "simplifying" your life, you can instead end up complexifying it.
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