I’m out of Gmail space! The gigabyte is gigabitten, gigagone. No, really, it is. No mas, zilch, nadda. They say it should last 3-5 years, but it lasted me only 3 months.

Gmail has been criticized for some silly things IMO but probably one of the truly worst missing features of Gmail is the one that will affect those who get a moderate to large amount of daily email. The more email you receive, the more spam you get, that’s the way it is these days. These Gmail users won’t realize this is that big of a deal until the email starts to back up into the thousands and realize: wait, there’s no way to “delete forever” more than 50 emails at a time. Quickly the Gmail storage will fill up until it become full. Then you’ll get messages about how it will only accept 10 days worth of email and start being rejected.

For 3 months from May 12, 2004 - Aug 13, 2004 I held an experiment by routing email from an Earthlink mailbox that I’ve have had since 1998 and a couple of our domains through my new Gmail account. I never published this Gmail address in newsgroups or on the web or asked anybody to send it spam. So the numbers that follow are real world numbers that include no artificially generated spam. This was strictly a real test of how much mail — spam and/or otherwise – I was receiving through regular use of these mail accounts.

The result
Over the course of 90 days I ran out the 1 GB of storage space that comes with GMail. This space they claim for “average users” should last 3-5 years (”5″ is the number used in their FAQ docs). The result of this fillup was a bulk amount of spam emails totalling 239,329 spam emails [screenshot] which worked out to be in excess of 92% of the mail I received over this time. And some of this email spam was filtered first by Earthlink! Now the next problem:

So how do I get rid of all this spam quickly, easily and with the least time possible? The answer: there didn’t seem to be any way to delete more than 50 ’spam’ (or any categorized) emails at one time. At a dizzying rate of over 2,500+ spam emails coming in daily and only deleting 50 emails at a time, I did a quick time test to see how fast I could delete emails through GMail’s system. Hold onto your seats, I was able to delete a rather pathetic 400 emails a minute on average using my speedy cable connection. So I did the math:

239,329 / 400 emails per minute = 598.32 minutes / 60 minues = 9.97 straight hours
2500 a day / 400 emails = 6 wasted minutes every day deleting spam.
6 wasted minutes a day x 365 days = 2190 minutes per year (36.98 hours a year)

Anybody up for a spam deleting party?! Yikes, this would take nearly 10 straight hours of nonstop, continuous button clicking, waiting and more button clicking just to delete completely worthless spam gathered over a 3 month period. Nearly 10 straight hours of lost productive business time just to be able to free up my much heralded 1GB Gmail space for using again! No way was this a realistic use of anybody’s time in life or a worthwhile treadmill to get on. The Gmail Team must have through this issue, didn’t they? I did some more research.

The Gmail FAQ section didn’t turn up any answers so I decided to send the Google team the following email:

Subject: How to delete more than 50 spams at one time
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:32:01 -0000

Spam has filled up my Gmail limit in 3 months (nearly 240,000 spam to be more precise). I now need to delete this out of the spam folder at one time. Is there any way to delete more than 50 spams at a time?

QuestionTopic: spam
Name: TDavid
OS: winxp
Browser: Internet Explorer 6.x

One of the first things I received from the GMail team was a canned autoresponder which left me in serious doubt that I’d ever see a response from them:

Thank you for your message. We regret that the volume of incoming inquiries we have received has prompted this general auto-reply. We hope that this message will provide the information you need. Although we cannot respond to every inquiry, we read each individual message, and thank you for taking the time to send us your comments and suggestions.

Your feedback is important to us, and all feature requests and suggestions for improvement are forwarded to the appropriate teams.

“Volume of email they receive” — I love it! Isn’t that ironic? To my astonishment, within 1 business day, I received a personalized answer from the Gmail Team just now about this issue:

—–Original Message—–
From: Gmail Team
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2004 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [#13269523] How to delete more than 50 spams at one time
Hello TDavid,

Thank you for your message.

While Gmail does not currently support the functionality to delete the entire contents of ‘Spam,’ we are testing many new features to improve the Gmail service. You might be interested to hear that we are working on the following:

- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
- Plain HTML version of Gmail
- Export Contacts

We hope you enjoy Google’s approach to email.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

I’m grateful for their response but none of those features really help me or my situation.  In fact, There’s no way anybody who gets any significant amount of spam is going to like this. I urge anybody reading this with a  blog or who knows somebody with a blog to send them a link to my story here and urge them to contact the Gmail beta team and ask them to do something about some sort of mass deletion feature. I realize that this type of feature could be disastrous for somebody who didn’t want to delete their precious email but there should be a button for dumping the spam button swiflty and easily — ok, maybe make the user re-enter in his/her password to confirm the mass deletion, but only allowing users to do this 50 at a time is insane.

In the meantime, my GMail account is now pretty much worthless until they fix this feature or I just get some crazy urge to spend a couple days (I doubt that I have the stamina — or anybody has the stamina — to sit in front of the PC in a mad deleting frenzy) deleting spam 50 messages at a time for nearly 10 nonstop hours.

Please send your friends with Gmail a link to this story, write a note on your blog about this story, and all us Gmail users unite to encourage the Gmail Team to please solve this mass deletion issue before Gmail leaves beta.

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