I think I’m hooked on deleting old mail; I spent a couple of hours doing it this afternoon while Diane was working on photos from our trip to Asia last January. I’m down to 12,550 conversations and 2.48 GB!

We tried another new recipe today, Mark Bittman’s Fast Tandoori Chicken from the New York Times. Two of the words in the title weren’t accurate, as I would have realized if I’d only read the comments on the recipe before making it.

The “tandoori” is something of an exaggeration; the chicken didn’t have the zip of real tandoori chicken. Of course, I made it in a broiler-oven, not a tandoor, so I didn’t expect quite the same results, but if I make it again, I’ll use a lot more spice and let it marinate longer (as quite a few commenters suggested).

The “fast” was the real problem. Putting together the marinade was quick enough, and the chicken marinated on the counter while we were doing other things. The recipe only called for broiling the chicken breast for four minutes on each side; this seemed a little short, but if you can’t trust the New York Times, who can you trust? When I took the chicken out of the oven, it looked OK – but I always check chicken to make sure the interior is up to 165F for safety. This one had gotten up to an awesome 70F – barely room temperature!

I put it back in the oven to bake for a few minutes. And a few more. And a few more. And then I cut into smaller pieces and put it back in again. All told, it took about 16 minutes of baking at 350F after the initial 8 minutes of broiling. Many commenters told similar stories; I wonder what kind of nuclear-powered oven Mark Bittman used to develop the recipe?

In the end, the chicken turned out OK, but next time I try a new recipe, I’ll listen to my suspicions!

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.