I decided to try a “new” email program yesterday – Thunderbird. It had to download my entire Gmail archive – and it ran into Gmail’s bandwidth limit, greatly reducing my access to my email account. New mail would come down to the computer, but anything I did to it (deleting mail, archiving it, moving it to a folder) didn’t go back to the server. I don’t understand why Google would stop me from deleting mail, but that’s the decision they made, and I have to live with it.

Fortunately, access to the mail through the Gmail webpage was unhindered, so I was able to deal with the little bit of mail that typically arrives on a Sunday.

And when we got home from the Farmers’ Market, I sat down at my laptop to clean up the mess. When I started, I had more than 28,000 emails, using 7.5 GB (three times the daily download limit).

I started by looking for emails with huge attachments – mostly photos I already had somewhere else, but there were lots of PowerPoint presentations, too.

Then I arbitrarily started looking at emails older than 1/1/2013 – when I saw one that didn’t look useful, I searched and deleted similar emails (by subject or correspondent). Goodbye, golf lessons! Farewell, ProMatch! Arrivederci, itineraries being forwarded to Tripit! Adieu, Toastmasters meeting agendas!

I still have a lot of mail that I could prune but I need to stop for the night. Google now tells me I have 14,600 emails (down by nearly 50%) and 2.52 GB (down by almost 2/3).

It was fun to visit the past, but it’s nice to say goodbye, too.

Even by lockdown standards, today was a quiet and homebound day for us. We took a morning walk before Shabbat Services, but that was the only time we left our property (we did get out of the house itself to cook and tend to the garden). Other than that, it was reading and working on the computer all day.

Speaking of the computer, the computer glasses I’d ordered from Zenni Optical arrived today. They’re going to take some getting used to, but I can see the difference that having single-focal-distance lenses makes already. Now I almost wish I hadn’t bought the cheapest (thickest) frames – I’d forgotten I’d be wearing them for Zoom calls!

This evening, we watched “Much Improv About Nothing” – improvised Shakespeare with improvisers from ComedySportz in San Jose, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The event was in support of Silicon Valley Shakespeare and was a lot of fun. The play, “A Quarrel of Lovers”, turned out to be a comedy (by audience demand) although Angie Higgins, the Artistic Director of SVS, was trying to influence the vote towards tragedy. I’m pretty sure they plan to put it on their Facebook or YouTube page soon.