I know I have a hard time throwing things away, especially if there’s even the most remote connection to someone or some event that I enjoy. Just look around my house and you’ll know I have a little problem.

But I’ve just discovered I’m an email hoarder too.

This week I got a warning from the god of gmail telling me that I was almost out of space and I either had to make space or buy more space. I didn’t know there was a limited amount of storage in gmail land, but the notice did remind me that lately I haven’t been keeping up and whole days go by when I don’t read or delete them.

Maybe, if I’m honest, several days of any given month go by with unread and unsorted messages.

Oh I’m not ignoring all of you. Well. I guess I am sort of. I do scan the list of emails daily, looking for a imminent crisis or a class I might enjoy, or an invitation to something fun, or a catchy blog post title.

Even then I sometimes just star it so I can find it later.

So I wasn’t that surprised to look at my gmail account and see I had over 9,000 emails sitting there taking up space. I figured if I hadn’t gone back to read them and nothing terrible had fallen out of the sky to dampen my day I could just delete a few thousand of them without looking.

I find it’s easier to toss things out if I don’t look.

So for the past few days I’ve been deleting, in batches of 100 because I don’t want to delete all 9000 emails – there are more recent ones I might want to read. Really. But then I realized that all of these ‘deleted’ emails were sitting in the TRASH, and my numbers of stored messages wasn’t going down, it was just getting reorganized.

The warning at the top of my email account said one of the ways I might lighten the load was to empty the trash. Sure. But I couldn’t find TRASH in the long list of stuff on the left. And I didn’t have the patience to dink around looking. I remembered from a long time ago that you had to do something more than just scroll, but I couldn’t remember exactly what.

So I kept deleting from the back of my email list and figured eventually the gmail garbage truck would come by and empty my trash.

But this morning I got mad looking at that warning, so I sat down with a cup of tea and a buch of determination and asked the internet – “Where is the trash in my gmail, and how the heck do I empty it?”

That internet is so smart! It popped right up with the answer, as it appears I am not the only one that couldn’t figure this out. I had 8,000 items in my trash which I quickly deleted permanently. The message warning me about space restrictions is gone.

And my tea isn’t even cold yet.

But I have to say if Google wasn’t trying to sell everybody more space don’t you think TRASH wouldn’t be hidden? Shame on you Google. Taking out the trash shouldn’t have been such an effort.

Even for this technically challenged senior citizen.