r/talesfromtechsupport • u/al-is-a-star • 27d ago
Short Mom Wonders Why She Has No Google Storage.
I don’t know if this belongs here, but it’s the best I could find.
For MONTHS my mom had been freaking out over the fact that she had no Google storage. Unable to join meets, download stuff, etc.
After another bout of her freaking out about it, I’m like “fine whatever”, I go to check her email. Relatively average? I think? At least for a woman who has had this email for a while. 3k in primary inbox, 3k in social, 5k in updates, etc.
I look down at her promotional folder. Any guesses? Any guesses on how many emails she had in her promotional folder? WELL YOU’RE WRONG!! She had 63k EMAILS!! Sixty three thousand!! Do you realize how absurd that is?
Her justifications were, she “didn’t know there was a “select all” feature”, and that “it took too long”. Yeah man. It takes a while for Google to delete 63,000 emails.
Took me about 40 mins to get everything deleted, but it’s solved now. Oh. My days.
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u/m4lrik 27d ago
I don't understand... that's why exactly the reason for "no storage"? I do have 74,233 mails in my primary gmail address using 31% of the 15GB (well, probably less, I do have other files in that storage as well) - so I still question why exactly she didn't have any more storage...
😅🙈
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u/NotYourNanny 27d ago
Promotional emails (spam) tend to be pretty image heavy. It adds up.
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u/justin-8 27d ago
The images aren't usually in the email they're just embedded links and won't take up space like that
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u/Lacutis 27d ago
Most of them dont embedded the image, its loaded when you view the email so that they can get impression rates (how many people open the email).
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u/NotYourNanny 27d ago
Depends on the spam in question, of course, and attachments, rather than images, are not at all uncommon. Especially if those attachments . . . aren't what they claim to be.
But I'm inclined to agree with others who have speculated that there was more to it, and OP doesn't mention checking Drive, where things like attachments end up, and syncing pictures is usually default.
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u/Future_Elephant_9294 27d ago
Each email can be as much as 50MB with images inline instead of referencing external. That's a maximum of 3TB in 63,000 emails.
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u/MikeSchwab63 27d ago
Reverse that. 15GB limit / 63K emails averages 238KB per message. Actually lower for the other messages not included, so 200KB.
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u/KeithFromCanadaOlson 27d ago
Oof. How are you going to explain to her that it WASN'T all of those emails you deleted, but all of the videos and pictures that weren't set to 'Storage Saver'?
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u/justin-8 27d ago
Which is now a legacy option. All photo backups count for storage these days.
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u/KeithFromCanadaOlson 27d ago
Huh. Yes and no, then. The cutoff was June 1, 2021. I hadn't realized because I rarely take photos, and most of mine are older than that and, therefore, don't count against my storage.
Good to know!
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u/Havoc_Rider 27d ago
You can also check storage usage distribution on Google Manage account option.
Usual culprit is Gdrive or google photos
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u/a4qbfb 27d ago
63k is not a lot of email, and should not have consumed all her storage.
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u/SmallLetter 26d ago
Yes, 63000 emails at the maximum of 35mb is 2.2GB . And most of them are probably not more than 5.
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u/H_is_for_Human 27d ago
I have 47k promotions, 35k updates, and about 11k unread inbox emails
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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 27d ago
11k unread 😱
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u/H_is_for_Human 26d ago
To be fair - I've kept it at 11k unread for the past year, so all those unread ones are increasingly irrelevant.
My work e-mail I keep at inbox 0.
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u/Ich_mag_Kartoffeln 26d ago
I remember returning to work from an extended holiday.
~4,500 emails 😳 waiting for me. Select all, delete.
I needed a cuppa after doing all that work!
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u/FixinThePlanet 27d ago
Like others have said, I wonder if it's something else.
On my old account the entire storage was taken up by my google photos because I was syncing them all. Maybe her photo gallery is full of screenshots and WhatsApp forwards
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u/The_Stoic_One 27d ago
Am I the only motherfucker that deletes emails? I currently have less than 90.
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u/loroller 26d ago
I haven't deleted an email since 2010. I'm on Google's Pro AI plan that gives me 5Tb. I'm at 12% after 16 years, so I think I'll have to start cleaning up my mailbox when I'm about 185 years old.
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u/Metaencabulator 26d ago
That was kind of GMail's whole pitch when it launched, you never have to delete anything and you can find whatever by searching. (Plus labels/tags instead of folders.) I pretty often need or want to find an old email to reference; I'm happy for Google to store it for me and provide the interface to dig stuff up (though with AI "features" it's more stupid now). You do you, I'm not the email police, but it would be weird to me to delete everything. I do archive so my inbox is pretty sparse.
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u/Miles_Saintborough DON'T TOUCH THAT! 26d ago
Confirmed motherfucker here that also deletes his emails. Never let it get past 100.
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u/Ferro_Giconi 13d ago
I have thousands of unread emails because I don't ever open the delivery notifications or bill notifications or things like that. I get the emails as reminders, swipe the notification away, then leave the email alone after that.
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u/27Purple 27d ago
Sounds like you've missed the actual source problem: The newsletter subscriptions. On the left (on desktop) there's an expandable menu where you can go to "Manage Subscriptions". Just unsub from everything, or she will come back and complain again in a frw months.
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u/anonymously_ashamed 27d ago
A few jobs ago we had some poorly tuned alerting that generated 500 emails a day, about half with a small .txt attached. Add in other 'good' alerting and a very email-heavy organization and 750 emails per day was rather common. But even at 500, it's 180k/year. I never deleted anything, just tags galore.
After 4 years my email was still only ~30gb.
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u/Metaencabulator 26d ago
You never met my mom. Literal hundreds of emails per week, almost all promo crap (often disguised as newsletters). She'd open stuff in tabs "to read later" and wonder why her laptop ran so slowly (300 tabs will do that). Typically showed a few hundred thousand unread in the inbox. She would spend nearly every waking moment on her laptop, mostly dealing with emails.
She passed away earlier this year and I'm still unsubscribing and marking spam emails to get the influx somewhat manageable (I need to watch for legit stuff I may have missed, autopaid bills etc).
Oh and she was on Google's free tier of storage. Adding my vote to "it's not 63K emails taking up your mom's storage".
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u/jeffrey_f 26d ago
I created a google script to delete any email in the INBOX only that is over 1 year old. It runs monthly.
The first ever run removed about 7500 emails. I think the last count was about 700. It it is steady. and most of the total email count is stuff I moved to other folders.
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u/Draugar90 25d ago
I was 9 years old when the music teacher had all of us kids create our own email address. This was in 1999. I still use this email address and I have never had any issues with lack of storage. I don't have issues with spam email or anything either. I do know that there has been some password leaks through the years, but other than that it seems pretty fine. I do however find it very ammusing and a bit scary that the microsoft logs indicate that there are thousands of failed login attempts every day from different places of the world. But no full inbox :3
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u/Arokthis 27d ago
I had a similar problem with my mom. She belonged to a couple of groups that would send out daily, weekly, AND individual messages. She was getting ALL of them, plus her "sent" folder was overflowing. Cleaning that up took a while!
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u/ResolveResident118 26d ago
Those are rookie numbers. They're also not gonna use up much space.
It's more likely to be any emails with large attachments that she's sent or received or any photos/videos she's uploaded. Either way, it's fairly easy to check what's using the space with Google and then either remove or add more space, if needed.
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u/boildkitty 26d ago
Helped a client who had over 175,000 emails. That took a bit. I really with Google would let you select more than 100 at a time.
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u/Bureaucromancer 23d ago
Other thing…
Stop using the web client for this.
Web is fine for day to day email… but that “it took 40 minutes to delete 63k messages” just wouldn’t be a thing if you did it through a desktop client.
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u/fresh-dork 26d ago
Do you realize how absurd that is?
i have about 35k. meh, i pay a bit of money to have more storage
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u/Distribution-Radiant 26d ago
I have nearly 60k showing unread...
I fork out $1.99/mo for the extra space since I'm super lazy, as does my nearly 80 year old mother. We've both had the same (separate) emails for over 15 years...
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u/CarelessAttitude5729 25d ago
not all heroes wear capes.. some will spend the time to sort out their parents inbox! seriously stuff of nightmares right here.. 63K emails?! youre right i wouldnt have guessed that many! i know people can be hoarders but do we really need to be hoarding emails from a few years ago? 40 min well spend, you deserve your weekend now
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u/glassFractals 25d ago
That's probably not the problem, I have hundreds of thousands. No problem, still on a free tier. They take virtually no storage each. If it was the emails, she must be getting unusually large emails; most marketing emails use remote image assets for better delivery and analytics tracking.
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u/elpasi 22d ago
Agreed.
My landlady was commenting how she was over 90% of the free storage tier. When I helped look for her, it turned out she had taken multiple 1GB+ videos looking around properties which were being auto-uploaded via Google Photos. More than half the storage was trivially cleaned up in seconds when she said "oh, no, I don't need that any more".
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u/xion1992 27d ago
I currently have 190k unread emails on my inbox for one of my addresses and 78k in another one.
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u/BrittEklandsStuntBum 26d ago
I've had my Gmail since you had to be invited and I have like 3 emails in my primary and that's it. Keeping three thousand unarchived is insane.
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u/DustinTheBold2 27d ago
Before my mom knew how to delete she had 109k. I felt your pain
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u/NorthPainting280 27d ago edited 26d ago
I've had uses explain that they may need the files in the 'deleted folder"
* treated the deleted file folder 'trash' as an additional storage folder 😯
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 26d ago
I was always up over 90% on the lousy 15 GB they give you. They I started using Immich as a Google Photos replacement. Now I keep about six months to a year's photos on Google and everything else is gone, available in Immich from my own instance at home. Just eliminating videos in Google Photos can save a load of space.
I also have a private email account that's not GMail and I'm slowly moving specific things over so I can minimize GMail.
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u/Cato0014 Experience: Home Network SysAdmin 23d ago
Today I learned Reddit has AI voiceovers like a fucking YouTube short. I fucking HATE AI
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u/2Completion2Ography 16d ago
I tell everyone who, willingly or otherwise, partakes in ai stuff that I hope their death is protracted, painful, and public.
Every single one. Whether it's a yt channel or mom not understanding what words mean.
Use your voice. Don't suffer it in silence.
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u/Miss_Smitten 22d ago
I have over a million unread emails. Literally. I remember my ex freaking when it was in the 800g range. I never delete them lol
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u/cyclops32 27d ago
How can you do a select all with a keyboard? Best I could do was select 100 at a time and delete those before going into trash and deleting the whole lot.
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u/captnkurt 26d ago
If you're looking to bulk delete thousands of emails at once, you need to use a PC. I don't think the mobile GMail app or even accessing GMail through your mobile browser gives you access to bulk actions.
If you're at a PC, there's the "select all" checkbox at the top. Checking it will select just the first 100, BUT it will show an option to Select all conversations that match this search
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u/cyclops32 26d ago
Thanks! I'll try that. Yeah, last time I used a third party email client like thunderbird it made the pc hang like crazy.
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u/Steerider 27d ago
Set up Syncthing and have her image folder back up to a personal computer (maybe yours). Get the photos off Google.
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u/Harry_Smutter 27d ago
Def other stuff taking up that storage. Emails take up such a small amount of it. Biggest culprit I've found is Google Photos backing up videos and huge photos. Check her devices and ensure they're not backing them up at max resolution and check her drive for video files. I haveta go through and do this again myself as I'm running outta storage, haha. Sitting at 81% and Google keeps harassing me 😅