I’ve been forwarding my work email to a Gmail account for over 2 years. I bounce around mail servers and clients a bit, and forwarding to Gmail at the server level gives me a backup of everything. Since switching away from Outlook, it’s harder to search older PSTs and that Gmail account of archived email has been handy. 2.8 GB of space may seem like a lot, but it does fill up eventually. I was getting close to the top of the brim on my work email account.

For me, 2 years is over 26,000 messages and around 2.6 GB space (95% full). That’s not counting the spam that Gmail filtered out along the way. I was dreading having to go in and manually start deleting unnecessarily newsletters and the like to free up space. Either that, or I was considering opening another Gmail account and having two archives.

Google to the rescue! They now offer paid storage upgrades. Just $20 per year and I have 6 GB of space…which should take at least another 2 years to fill.