Gmail trash - cleaning out oldest

[billhansen]

I like to keep messages in Trash until they're about 6 months old and
then delete them. In Gmail, the only way I've found to delete older
messages is to page through Trash, one page at a time, until I get to
the Trash that's six months old, and then to delete messages one page
at a time. That takes quite a bit of time. Isn't there some way to go
directly to those messages which are at least 6 months old (that is,
if I were deleting today, I'd want to go directly to messages of May
2011)?

Bill Hansen

[Michael Methot]

Sorry, was rushing through my mail and misread your question. 

At the top of the page to the right of the search bar when you're logged in to Gmail, you'll see some small blue text that says Show search options. Normally this would customize Google search results, but as long as you are in Gmail ie. mail.google.com/blahblahblah you can specify specific search parameters for your mail. So set the dates as this date to this date and select trash from the drop down menu, and hit search. 

Cheers

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Michael Methot <majj...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just hover over your message count in the upper right corner (eg. 1-100 of 1000) and select oldest from the little box that pops up. 

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[Michael Methot]

Just hover over your message count in the upper right corner (eg. 1-100 of 1000) and select oldest from the little box that pops up. 

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:34 AM, billhansen <billhan...@gmail.com> wrote:

[JohnW]

Bill,

Reading your question, I'm bound to wonder 'why' your "trash" still has stuff in it that more than 30 days old?

Trash (aka Bin) is actually a label applied to messages you've chosen to 'Delete' - and one of Gmail's 'benefits' is that when you delete a message you actually have 30 days (from that decision) to recover that message before Google's server (which is holding your messages) sweeps through your storage quota (that 7GB allocated to you and used for your mailbox) removing files/messages labelled as 'trash' (or Spam!) which were labelled as such more than 30 days ago.

I'm aware that this process doesn't always seem to work to the 30 days it is supposed to - which can be a saviour to some users! - and can appear to be 'broken' since you may (as I have) have messages which are 'older' than the 30 days in the Bin/trash - but remember it is the date at which they were labelled as such, rather than the date of creation which determines whether they are swept away or not. I personally believe that many people do themselves a disservice by regularly "forcing" the removal of messages from their trash/Bin since it can lead to tears when a required message is later found to be 'missing'. Yes, they have a clean conscience that their mailbox is all nicely 'foldered' and clear of Spam, but in my time I've had to console many users that their desire for 'mailbox cleanliness' has cost them "that message" they now crave. Far better to spend a little time using GYB (or 'Gmail Backup') to store a copy of your complete mailbox contents onto your own storage before deleting anything. And I'd commend that process to any readers of these words.

[bill hansen]

Michael - The "show search options" sounded like a perfect way to find posts within a specific date range, but when I tried it, no matter what dates I put in, I got the "no posts matched your search " error message. It was also true whether I chose Trash or All Mail as the search criterion.

 

However, clicking on the oldest date in the boldface black date range at upper right (e.g. - "1-50 of 4572)- clicking on the "4572" brings up the very last email which was in Trash. That's easier than working all the way back from the present date. I can live with that.

 

Thanks - Bill

[Andy]

You do need to use the correct syntax when entering the date range to
search for. Gmail does not seem to be very flexible about that
syntax. If you look under Help, there is a help page that describes
the syntax for search terms, including dates.

When using the "Show search options" link, it would normally not
include your Trash, because searching usually ignores Trash and Spam.
You need to specifically tell it to look there, by way of either
"in:trash" or "label:trash". That works when typing in all your
search terms in the normal search box, but I'm not sure how that works
when you click on the "Show search options" link.

If you really want your old mail to go back 6 months, you will need to
store them somewhere other than "Trash". As already said, things in
the Trash normally empty after only 1 month. That being the case, you
might think about organizing the process by setting up separate labels
for each month, something like "JanTrash" (which you empty in August),
"FebTrash" (empty in September), etc.

Andy

[bill hansen]

John -  You've made a very good point. In my case, quite a few older emails are retained beyond 30 days. Some of them go back to February 2011. Most of the oldest ones are emails which I starred or labelled, but not all are starred or labelled.

 

I'll give serious consideration to saving all emails as you suggest (what is "GYB" by the way?) but over the past many years, saving 6 months' of emails has proved to be plenty. If I have too many emails to search through blindly, I'm unlikely to see the one critical email I need, stuck in the haystack of hundreds or thousands of old emails. However - I always save critical emails to separate folders elsewhere in my HD, and back up the HD 3 times weekly, and so far that's been adequate.

 

I did learn, early in my experience with Gmail, that I must not delete "All Mail" unless I've backed up critical things to a separate place, outside of Gmail. Deleting "All Mail" deleted every copy, even those which were stored in "Archive", those which were starred, and those which were in separate folders within Gmail with labels on them. That's probably obvious to some other people, but it still seems very strange to me.

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

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[bill hansen]

Andy -

 

Thanks - as you've seen from my earlier posts, I try to save critical emails to separate folders on my own HD, outside of Gmail. Obviously I'm still learning Gmail and have a long way to go before I'm expert at it, or even comfortable with it. So - I need to ask - if Gmail empties everything out after 30 days (it doesn't always, but that's apparently the default) why would a folder labelled "Jan Trash" stick around longer than a month? Or, put another way, how would I go about keeping those emails in Gmail longer than a month, as opposed to savig them to my own HD?

Bill

 

 

[Sarah]

Bill, part of what you are struggling with is the difference between labels and folders. If we ignore spam and trash for a moment, Gmail has only one folder, that is "all mail".
What Gmail does is allow you to organise messages by using labels, so you can look at a subset of messages. There is only one copy of each message, even if that message has 3 different labels. So labels allow you to view groups of related messages; but those messages are not in a folder by themselves, they are actually in "all mail", they just have labels to allow you to organise them.
When you archive a message it removes the inbox label, but the message is still in "all mail".

[Andy]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 08:44, bill hansen <billhan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ... So - I need to ask - if Gmail empties everything out

> after 30 days (it doesn't always, but that's apparently the default) why
> would a folder labelled "Jan Trash" stick around longer than a month?

Only the Trash and Spam folder messages auto-delete after 30 days.
All your own folders, everything other than those two (i.e.,
everything in "All Mail"), lasts forever.

As already mentioned, messages auto-delete 30 days after they were
last put in those two folders. So it is perhaps a minor distinction,
but Gmail never actually empties out your entire Trash folder all at
once ... unless you specifically tell it to empty the Trash (which I
NEVER do).

Andy

[Andy]

> Deleting "All Mail" deleted every copy, even those which were stored
> in "Archive", those which were starred, and those which were in separate
> folders within Gmail with labels on them. That's probably obvious to some
> other people, but it still seems very strange to me.

Bill,

You have apparently been fooled (for lack of a better word) by the
meaning of Gmail's "Archive" function.

If Google were introducing Gmail from scratch today, perhaps they
wouldn't use the word "Archive", because of the confusion it has
caused to many people.

"Archive" in Gmail does NOT mean the message is moved to some sort of
permanent storage. "Archive" means one thing and one thing only: Take
this message out of the Inbox.

All messages that you receive in Gmail ... with the exception of those
in "Trash" or in "Spam" ... are already in permanent storage. They
will stay around forever, until you delete them, or close your Gmail
account.

Initially, new messages (that aren't Spam) appear in the "Inbox"
folder (actually a label), but you can take them out of the "Inbox" at
any time by clicking on the "Archive" button. That doesn't change how
the message is stored; it just makes it no longer appear in your
"Inbox".

Whether a message is starred or labeled by you has no effect at all on
how long it is stored. The only thing affecting that is whether it is
in "Spam" or "Trash". (And it needs to be precisely those two system
labels, i.e., "Trash", not "My Trash" or "Jan. Trash".)

Andy

[bill hansen]

 

 

 

Andy - Okay - that's one of the many things I hadn't realized, and it's very helpful to know.

 

Bill

 

 

[Michael Methot]

Bill, I found a great little analogy for how Gmail labels work. 

Imagine this: 
- each email is a piece of paper 
- labels are post-it notes (A.K.A. sticky notes) 
- there are default sticky notes, like "Inbox", "Sent items", "Trash", "Spam" 
- you can also create labels (i.e. sticky notes) 
This means that – unlike in other email services – you do not put the emails into folders. You actually attach labels to the emails.

You only have ONE (1) copy of every email. One piece of paper. 

-In a conversation, for example, gmail groups messages, each reply you recieve or send is ONE piece of paper. That would mean in this conversation, including this reply, think of this conversation as 12 sheets of paper.  
- no matter how many labels (sticky notes) you use for a message (piece of paper), you still only have one copy (1 piece of paper with that message)  
- you can attach as many labels to this one copy as you want, just as you can stick a lot of post-it notes to the same one piece of paper 
This is why your email disappears from everywhere when you delete it; because deleting the email means deleting the "piece of paper"!!

Hope that helps a bit.

Mike

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[bill hansen]

Got it Michael - thanks - Bill

[bill hansen]

Hi Sarah - Actually, I think I did understand that all email, every bit of it, is in "All Mail". The surprise to me was that deleting a piece of mail from All Mail removes the mail from any Gmail subfolders I've made. Now that I know that only Trash and Spam are deleted every 30 days, I'll stop worrying about that. I alsol have the copies of critical emails which I save to my HD outside of Gmail.

[Sarah]

Bill, that is what both Michael & I were trying to explain - there are no sub-folders (labels are not folders - I like Michael's analogy of post-it notes); your messages, except spam and trash, are all stored in the same place, and that is "all mail".
Using the term "folders" in the context of gmail is rather misleading.

[bill hansen]

Okay - I think we're all taking about the same things now. I will try to remember not to refer to "folders" when posting to this users' group. Thanks to all of you for your help. It has cleared up several things for me.

[JohnW]

Bill,

GYB = "Got Your Back" Backup program.  http://code.google.com/p/got-your-back/wiki/GettingStarted

This was put together by a couple of Gmail TCs when they found that Gmail Backup had failed to be developed any further. [I did help them when they were testing it, and the hope was at that stage that a Google staff programmer would look at applying a Gmail GUI to it. But that was at the time when many people's accounts were being compromised because of poor password security - many users have the same password for their Gmail account as for their Facebook account, and from there they were being "stolen". The hackers then stole their Contacts data (for sale to spammers?) and as an added kick-in-the-teeth, their e-mails were also deleted!]

I should warn that it's a Command line program rather than a Windows GUI, but the instructions given at that url are quite adequate for users who read them properly.

[If you were confident with DOS - back in the days! - then GYB will be a synch, and prove very useful.]

The program simply uses the established IMAP protocols to copy the contents of your mailbox down onto your own storage media, so that "you" have a direct backup of those messages, and in the event that your account gets compromised, and the perps deliberately delete all your messages, then you can restore the mailbox to the state of your last backup.

Might I enquire just how you've been "saving critical e-mails to separate folders elsewhere on your HD"? Do I take it that you're using a e-mail client program to manage your mailbox?

Following on from Stryker's choice of analogy, I'd present a slightly different one.

Consider your mailbox as "a big digital bucket", into which all your messages are put. When you receive a message in your mailbox, Google ascribes it with the "inbox" label.

And when you open up the webmail interface, that automatically invokes a very rapid search for all messages which have the inbox label applied to them, and then it displays the results. Since you won't always want your messages to show up in this search, Google looked for a 'word' to describe removing the 'inbox' label from messages - and as Andy says, they chose 'Archive'. It has confused no end of people, since they seem to think it deposits the message in some location (an archive) other than their mailbox. But Google have been generous in the first instance and allocated each person a quota of just over 7GB of Hard disk space: they aren't going to provide any additional space (well not for mail messages, anyway!) unless you cough up some of the readies!! Mind you $5 per year for an extra 20GB is hardly exorbitant! 

[Previously, I used the phrase "remove the 'inbox' label" in preference to Andy's "take the message out of the inbox" since "technically there is no "inbox" for it to be taken out of! Semantics, I know, but it does help to get the paradigm correct!]

The reason I choose to describe your mailbox as a bucket is because there are no partitions in a bucket: ALL (and I do mean all!) messages are in there - Spam, Sent Mail, 'trash', all mixed together with your desired messages, hopefully all neatly labelled. Then you do searches for what you want to see, and that's how you get to see the display of those messages. And that may also explain why you can't have a mixture of labels being displayed on the screen - you can only define one label to be used for the search, except when you're using the "Show search options" (which you now get to see when clicking on the downward-pointing arrowhead in the Search box, in the new Gmail display!).

There are a couple of oddities: 'All Mail' does indeed show all messages in the mailbox EXCEPT those labelled as 'Spam' and 'trash'. Those messages can only be viewed if you look for those particular labels specifically. And the auto-removal which I spoke of previously only happens to messages with those precise labels on - as Andy has advised.

One final point to make: the 'Sent Mail' label is unique - in that it cannot be removed from a retained message! Whatever you do to the message, it always retains that particular label, until it is destroyed in the clearance from the trash/Bin. Even if you 'delete' a message and then recover it later, the 'Sent Mail' labels remains attached to the message!

[bill hansen]

John -

 

You asked: "

Might I enquire just how you've been "saving critical e-mails to separate folders elsewhere on your HD"? Do I take it that you're using a e-mail client program to manage your mailbox?"

 

No email client to manage my mailbox - though as a heritage feature, some of my email is still automatically forwarded from Gmail to two much older MS Outlook email addresses.

 

The "system" I use to save critical files is a homegrown one, which has saved my tail many times over the last 15-20 years. What I've done with Outlook Express, Outlook itself, and now with Gmail, is to Copy the contents of really critical emails, Paste them into a Word document, and Save that Word document to a separate one of folders on my HD. The HD gets backed up weekly to two different external HDs.

 

There aren't many emails which fall into that "critical" category - I'll guess that it's maybe one in a few hundred. On the external HD I have folders (some of them with subfolders) for various things - for example "Orders" for records of purchases I've made, the electronic receipts of them, etc  - "Dogs" for health info on our dogs, interesting web articles about dogs, - "Computers/Smartphone/Droid" for potentially important tech articles and links - and so forth. You get the idea. Without counting them, there are probably a couple of dozen such folders, with info in some of them going back 15 years, in others going back only a few months.

 

This makes it easy and quick for me to find things months or years later. It probably sounds cumbersome, but my needs are relatively small.  If I have a HD failure I don't lose the data, because of the backups. For me, this homegrown "system" has worked well.

 

I like the idea of "GYB" backup for Gmail. I will look into that program and learn how to use it. Thanks!

 

Bill

 

 

 

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