Recently, I was emailing someone back and forth on their personal Gmail account, when suddenly my emails began bouncing back. After a few days of frustration, I reached out via a different method of communication. Did they randomly change their email address or what?
“Sorry!!! I just had to delete a bunch of emails,” they replied. “I ran out of storage.”
[jwplayer 41izIXmG]
Speaking as someone with 3,204 unread emails in their personal Gmail alone who hasn’t yet experienced this, I was surprised and a little bit dubious, tbh. But a recent Bloomberg report suggested this is all part of Google’s master plan: lure us in with free email storage, and then make us pay.
According to the report, Google has been rolling back its free storage offerings in recent months, and pushing people onto its paid cloud subscription service Google One instead. The cost for consumers is minimal – in Australia, 100 GB of storage is $2.49 per month, or a discounted $24.99 per year – but given the sheer size of Google, it could generate billions for the company.
“Google has become a monster … on the other hand I haven’t paid for email in 15 years,” one person tweeted.
“I feel unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free Google storage,” another person said. “Felt intimate. Please don’t make me pay!”
The report calculated that even if just 10% of Gmail’s more than one billion users signed up for Google One, it would generate almost US $2.4 billion per year for the company. That’s a lot of money to be paid on people’s reluctance to be managing their inbox.
Users still receive 15 GB of storage for free – that didn’t change when Google One replaced Drive earlier this year. But if you’ve spent the past decade not deleting your emails, as well as picking up content to be stored like digital balls of lint, then it might be time for a clean.
https://twitter.com/emilyyyyy/status/1186312639879757825
Google has some handy tips on deleting masses amounts of emails, or else finding and deleting the randomly huge emails taking up way too much of your space. Everyone’s favourite declutter queen Marie Kondo also advises not getting lost in too many folders — just use “unprocessed” (for anything that needs a reply or has yet to be read) and “save” (for anything you need to hold on to).
Failing all of that, you can just go nuclear and delete your entire inbox, and hope anything that important or urgent will receive a follow up from the sender. I can’t promise this will work, but I did once delete 15,000 emails in one go using this strategy, and nobody (as far as I’m aware) has died yet.
The only thing you absolutely shouldn’t do is sign up for extra storage, and then forget about those monthly payments for the rest of your life. It’s exactly what they’re hoping you’ll do.
