Gmail Shenanigans

In January I went through a stint of daily updates to make my annual quota for posts. One of the topics that seemed a bit more forced was about cleaning my email inbox. Recently, that has become retrospectively more interesting.

In January's update, I said that I had received notice that my inbox was 72% full. This was an account that I'd had since I was a teenager and had made no real effort to maintain. So I didn't take much alarm, knowing that it would be years until I had to worry about it. I did use it as motivation to try cleaning it up, though. By just deleting impersonal messages in the "Social" and "Updates" files, I managed to get it down to 65%.

However, about a week or so ago, I got a notice saying that my inbox was 100% full! It came with a warning that if I didn't free up room in a month's time or buy more space through a subscription, I would be locked out of my account. How was this possible, when less than a month ago I'd dropped it from 72% to 65%?

The data breakdown said that nearly half my space was being used up by Google Photos. So I deleted enough of them to bring it down to 93%

 The next day it was back up to 100%. I wondered if this was a scam by Google to coerce me into buying more space. Maybe this was the AI bubble bursting and, Gemini failing to be profitable after such significant investment, was forcing the company to charge for previously free services.

I considered that my account could have been hacked, but I couldn't find any activity that wasn't my own.

Eventually I figured it out. I have an Android phone, which, like Google and Gmail, is owned by Alphabet. I thought that it was odd that so much of my space was being used by Google Photos even though I hadn't remembered it using a significant amount of space back when I got the 72% notice in January. But when I looked at the photos, they were all ones I'd taken.

I didn't consider this odd because I'm used to my Google accounts being synced. But it turns out that it was replicating the pictures on my phone and uploading it to my Google Photos which has a fraction of the space. So when I deleted images it would just refill itself with whatever remaining pictures that I had which it wasn't able to fit before. I must have accidentally clicked something in my settings at some point.

I managed to deativate this, and now, because I made an additional attempt to clean out my Social and Updates files when I was trying to bring it down from 100%, my inbox is now at 58%

So after like, 20 years of slow, incremental use without any attempt at managing it, in the past two months my inbox has gone: 72% - 65% - 100% - 93% - 100% - 58%