Is Your Email Inbox Getting Crowded? How to Create A Free Searchable Email Archive

I use Apple Mail for most of my email work. The program stores email on my hard drive.

I share a lot of case information with colleagues over email and search old emails frequently. I have thousands of emails in my inbox. I’ve tried to de-clutter it by organizing the email into folders, but I don’t have time to do it the right way.

Having all that email piled up on my computer’s hard drive also bogs down the search function when I need it. It would be nice to freely delete those thousands of messages without worrying if I’d ever see them again.

One option is to just start using Gmail or Yahoo for all my email work – all the old emails are stored on their servers, ostensibly forever. The problem is that online email services have storage limits – I’m currently using 33% of one Gmail account’s capacity (about 2.5GB), so that will run out eventually.

I’ve created a video that shows you how to quickly create an extra Gmail account that serves as an online email storage archive. It takes about three or four minutes to set up.

In a nutshell, just create the extra account and forward a copy of each email you receive to that extra address. Since you can create an unlimited number of Gmail accounts, you’ll always have a backup of all your emails.

You can log into that archive email account anytime, from your phone or computer and search old emails. This gives you the freedom to delete old emails from your computer or from your main online email account’s cluttered inbox.

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