Technology

Digital Housekeeping: Gmail

By Stephen Bolen,

Published on Aug 21, 2025   —   2 min read

Photo by Kirill Sh / Unsplash

Summary

20+ years of email from Google will put you on the upper bounds of the free-tier of storage. But you don't have to pay to play.

Things were getting bloated in Gmail-land.

I repeatedly received warnings that my account was approaching that 15GB limit and if I didn't subscribe to Google One, I'd start seeing my email disappear. That was not going to happen - not on my watch, anyway.

So I did what any normal person would do when faced with digital extortion from a FAANG company: download an archive and nuke 20-odd years of Gmail history from my online account. The .mbox archive of 180,000+ emails is now sitting on my Mac, my Gmail storage is back down under 1GB, and I'm now good for another 20 years of fname.lname[at]gmail[dot]com email messages.

Going through the archive has been fun. The first message I received from Google when creating my gmail account was the welcome email. Here it is in its entirety:

The email from "Gmail Team" reads: First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations. So what else is new? Gmail has many other special features that will become apparent as you use your account. You’ll find answers to most of your questions in our searchable help section, which includes a Getting Started guide. You'll find information there on such topics as: How to use address auto-complete Setting up filters for incoming mail Using advanced search options You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful. You're one of the very first people to use Gmail. Your input will help determine how it evolves, so we encourage you to send your feedback, suggestions and questions to us. But mostly, we hope you'll enjoy experimenting with Google's approach to email. Speedy Delivery, The Gmail Team p.s. You can sign in to your account any time by visiting http://gmail.google.com
It's almost cute how there aren't any inline images.

I've also found emails to/from my late father with pictures of my kids, coordinating surprise birthday parties for my mom, and him just being a great dad. I'll keep and cherish those digital tchotchkes forever.

However, there's a lot of bloat in that archive and I just don't need to keep it around.

Pruning and Cleaning

The next step was to take advantage of the imported .mbox file and filter out all the crap I don't need – think mailing lists, event information from 15 years ago, et cetera. MediaTemple receipts from 2011? Nope! GoDaddy marketing emails that never hit the trash can? GTFO! SprintPCS bills from 2008? Hell no!

Fortunately, Apple Mail has a robust-enough search function with smart mailboxes. Because the .mbox file is stored on the device, it can return results pretty quickly.

Dialog box to configure a smart mailbox in Apple's Mail.app – the search term is "Costco"
Surprise! There were a lot of Costco emails - this query returned 2,242 messages.

Importing back to Gmail for free

There are a lot of tools out there to help you migrate your mail archives to Gmail, but you shouldn't have to pay when you can use an old ally: Mozilla Thunderbird!

  1. Download Thunderbird and add your Gmail account to the application. Easy enough.
  2. In the Tools menu, click Add-ons and search for ImportExportTools. Install that!
  3. Create a new folder for your .MBOX archive in your Local Folders in Thunderbird.
  4. Right-click the newly-created folder and select ImportExportTools and click Import mbox file.
  5. Then, once fully imported, copy the emails from Thunderbird to your Gmail account.

Again, there's no need to pay $60 for a one-year license for an activity that you'll do maybe once. That's dumb. Use probably your first email client to do it and spend that money supporting the Mozilla foundation or EFF.

Author profile

Stephen Bolen

Stephen infrequently posts about things that he finds interesting. That's what this is, right? A blog?

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