OKALOOSA COUNTY, Fla. — A question about emptying the email Trash folder opens the lid on a surprisingly important part of digital housekeeping, writes Jeff Werner in this week’s It’s Geek to Me.
GEEK NOTE:
Once again, for lack of any questions from readers in the field, I turned to one of the questions asked by my lovely bride. Her questions often sound simple, but the answers usually aren’t. Also, the things that cause her trouble also apply to many of you readers. So, I hope her question and my answer help you, and I really hope you’ll take a moment and send in a question of your own!
QUESTION:
When I go through my email, I delete all mail that I don’t want, which appears to send it to the Trash folder. I clean out my email every day, so after a few days, the Trash folder starts to fill up. How often should I delete the trash folder?
– Wendy W.
Bluewater Bay, Florida
ANSWER:
As it is with all good questions that apply to a lot of people, the answer to this one is “that depends.” So, to get anywhere on this topic, we’ll have to first discover what it depends upon.
In your case, Wendy, your deleted emails wind up in a folder called “Trash”. That occurs because you are using Gmail as your mail client. Most email services, including Gmail, do indeed call that folder “Trash”. So does Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird, Mozilla, and others. Then there’s Microsoft. Their Outlook email client calls it “Deleted Items”. Go figure.
Like any trash can, the trash folder in your email reader builds up its unwanted gunk over time. Or so it seems.
We’ll get to that momentarily, but the reason that it doesn’t just delete things outright is because there’s always that possibility of something getting deleted in error. If that happens to you, it can be recovered from the Trash folder and put back into whatever email filing system you have implemented.
Depending on the contents of that email, I dare say the ability to undelete it, as the process is often called, could make you very happy.
So, the Trash folder is a kind of buffer that sits between your desire to delete emails that you don’t want and the human predilection to change one’s mind or accidentally delete something one wants to keep.
Which leads directly to Wendy’s question.
How long should one wait before pulling the plug and allowing these emails to be swallowed forever, never to return? You might not realize it, but that decision may already have been made for you.
In many, if not most, email services, deleted emails only persist in the Trash folder for a limited time span. Gmail has theirs set to 30 days. In fact, if you go into your Gmail account and visit the Trash folder, you’ll see, prominently posted right at the top of the Window, the phrase “Messages that have been in Trash more than 30 days will be automatically deleted.”
That’s darn convenient if you’re worried about too many messages accumulating in this folder.
About the only person who wouldn’t like a self-emptying trash can is that poor soul who discovers on the 31st day or later that he or she accidentally deleted some irreplaceable email. But if you happen to be absolutely certain that the stuff in Trash is indeed trash, next to the aforementioned notice, you’ll find a link that reads “Empty Trash now.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what that one does.
One thing that I haven’t mentioned, which leans directly into Wendy’s question, is the amount of storage space you have available. Everything you have in your email box, including stuff in the Trash folder, takes up space, which is a finite quantity.
Gmail provides what is, in this Geek’s opinion, a very generous amount of storage. Even their free tier includes a whopping 15 gigabytes of storage. Before you ever need to worry about how often you should empty your trash, you should look and see how much available space you have.
To do that, go to your Inbox and scroll all the way to the bottom. On the left side of the center pane, you’ll see the phrase “xx GB of yy GB used,” where “xx” is the amount used, and “yy” is the total amount of space associated with your account. Unless you get some really huge emails, or you exchange a large number of them every day, chances are you’re only using a relatively small portion of your available space.
I should mention that Outlook—at least the installed version that I’m familiar with— doesn’t have an auto-empty span associated with its “Deleted Items” folder. A quick glance at mine shows tens of thousands of emails dating back over a decade. And that’s okay, because I have plenty of server space available to me to store it all.
To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question, visit my website at ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com!)
Jeff Werner, a software engineer based in Niceville, Florida, has been writing his popular “It’s Geek to Me” tech column since 2007. He shares his expertise to help readers solve everyday tech challenges. To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question, visit ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com!).
