Here we are another year gone and a new one to begin. How was your New Year’s Eve – saying goodbye to one of the most ‘challenging year ever’ globally! I don’t even want to talk about ‘the virus’ or anything to do with it. Let’s just dwell on the positives of the year. We all went through it in our own ways and felt our own pain and aches and sorrow and grief and happiness and joy and we all as one world just hope that 2021 is better!
But then…that’s what we wish for every year don’t we? At least 2020 has taught us resilience if anything. It has showed us our most vulnerable moments as an individual, family, local community, nation and world.
Some have passed on, while some of us still here – and well…life goes on with just another day of chasing dreams!
It’s been awhile since I last posted – actually I don’t think I did much blogging at all in 2020 though it was an ideal time to – maybe I’ll do all the delayed posts this year. We’ll see.
But you know with it being the time of the year with resolutions being made, and cleaning out things from yesterday…
I wanted to share with you about what I just did, some couple of hours ago.
A major achievement for me! I also did some cleaning! lol!
(drumroll!)
I cleared out my GMAIL! Yep! From 30,000+ unread emails to 2,000 and a bit.
Phew!

I only took a screenshot of this when I realised that – hey – I should do an article on this! LOL! so this 22,476 was halfway through it.
What motivated me to go through my emails?
Well… my email stopped! yes STOPPED! No receiving or sending! and I don’t even know how long ago… I only realised when I kept refreshing and the last email was somewhere to the end of December. (ok so it must have been just before New Year’s Eve) and I didn’t see any 2021 emails – that was on the phone.
I thought it was because my phone storage was low – so I tried accessing my email on the laptop when the notification at the top showed up:
“You can’t send or receive emails because you’re out of storage space.”…

This is a screenshot I got off from Google – I didn’t take a snipping of mine – because I didn’t think I’d need to.
How can someone run out of space? Many people ask me this! LOL! I did! by the way I have two other gmail addresses I use for other purposes – and they are also running out of space.
How much storage space does google give? 15 Gb! That is a lot! Buuuut as you can see, it can run out 😀 eventually.
I had used 15.3 Gb of my 15Gb storage! hahaha!
How did I manage to run out of storage space and get GMAIL to stop working?
(drumroll!)
Google Photos! Synching!
So beginning of 2020, before I moved country for studies – I decided to sync my photos from my phone to Google Photos! Yeh, for back up and also so that I could access them from laptop, phone where ever I went – but I didn’t realise that I was taking gazillion photos and each and every one of them was synching on my google storage.
When you create your gmail account – you have access to all the other google features in the one account – Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Calendar etc – and they all share the same 15Gb!
So while my photos were syncing I was running out of space.
I disabled syncing – but by then, I just couldn’t be bothered going through the photos to remove the ‘uneccesary’ ones so that there would be space and so just left it.
Apart from that – I have been using Google Drive a lot now in 2020 – you know being in isolation and doing things online etc.
and another thing was ‘SUBSCRIPTIONS’.
Which makes up the bulk of the 30,000+ UNREAD gmails (emails). I’ve had my gmail account since 2013 or end of 2012.
(it is my 2nd one – my original one I had when gmail came to PNG back in 2007 – has been permanently deleted – and that’s another dramatic story to never be told hehe!)
Since end of 2012, I’ve subscribed to all sorts of mailing lists! Well only realised now going through cleaning it all out.
From Tech Subscriptions, to Women Issues , to Faith and Bible subscriptions, Daily Messages (which took a bulk delete) and mailing groups, and the list goes on and on.
Some of them along the way I unsubscribed, but much of the ‘unread’ mail still sat in the inbox.
How do you filter out unread emails?
You can filter out quickly just your unread emails by typing – Label: Unread in the search box of your gmail – this will show all your unread emails.

and search by subscription – you include the email address or the Name of sender after label:unread to further filter out specific senders.
It’s always handy knowing these to help you search in your gmail but can work in Google and other search engines. Use of ” “ (quotations) if you want to specifically search on that string of letters name so it doesn’t pick up other words that contain those key words.
Deleting Google Photos
I just had to go through individually and delete the blurry , repeated and not-needed pics. There is the multi-select option so you can scroll, select as many as you can and then delete. Select in blocks of at least 20 or 40 and then delete – don’t try to do everything all at once!
So from 15.3 Gb I started removing some of the unnecessary snappy pics from Google Photos – to bring storage to 15Gb and then I started going through gmail emails and unsubscribed and mass deleted and thrashed zillions of emails!
I am now down to: 12.23 GB (81%) of 15 GB used – Phew! Here is the break up of Google Storage of my account.

I still have much cleaning to do of Gmail and Google Photos but for now – life goes on! At least one less clutter done for – I think 12,000 from 60,000+ is a maaajor improvement and 30,000 unread to 2,354 deserves a tiny celebration 😀

So here it is me celebrating – writing a post about it all!
How is your gmail? or hotmail?
Are you running out of space? do you read every email that comes in? Do you also subscribe to so many mailing lists?
Some tips from all of this:
- Don’t subscribe unnecessarily – Today I don’t think there is a need because you can just go online whenever you want to and read up the same information that is sent to your email (but the plus side of it – you don’t have to search globally and far – it is all in your gmail). If there is weekly mails – opt for that rather than daily (unless if you think is really necessary – like 30days to Losing Weight Email-A-Day.
- Don’t sync Google Photos to your mobile!! If you want to, select a certain folder only! There are settings and options you can do that – that way, not all the photos get synced. Most of mine were whatsapp images – from the family groups where we post about every little meme, step by step of our daily lives lol! Yes but don’t. Otherwise create a separate Gmail account just for your photos – I just thought of that – maybe I’ll do that too now! (2021 Project)
- Make use of labels features and categories for your gmail to help you organise your mail.
- Create a separate gmail for subscriptions if you need to. Cool thing about accessing gmail on your mobile device, you can easily switch between multiple gmail accounts.
Oh if you want to check your storage status – scroll down to the bottom of your last email on the page showing, you will see it in red – under it will be the word “Manage” – click on that will show you the break up of storage of your gmail account.

Hi5s to me for a major achievement 5 days into the New Year!
Let’s keep the good vibes going! All the best to you too!
Here is my first post for 2021! Sure hope it is not the last! 😀