Declutter Your Email Inbox or Pay for Cloud Storage?

Because our inboxes are stuffed with endless sale offers, newsletters, notifications, updates and all those personal emails (especially the ones with big photo and PDF attachments), your inbox will be growing this year — unless you tame it.

Google won't be alone in enforcing storage rules in 2021. An email account on your Apple phone isn't free. The company offers 5 GB of storage and charges if you go over: 99 cents monthly for 50 GB or $2.99 for 200 GB.

On Android phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy series or the Google Pixel, most email defaults to Gmail since Google makes Android software.

Microsoft's Outlook.com, at one time called Hotmail, lets you keep 15 GB of free storage but urges you to upgrade to 1 TB of storage for $6.99 a month, or $69.99 annually. The subscription includes online backup files; access to a more secure, ad-free email program; and the use of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word.

Yahoo and AOL's mail programs, while still free, are littered with ads. AOL users can skip the ads by upgrading to a paid version for $8.99 a month. Yahoo, which like AOL, is also owned by Verizon, this month made it harder for Yahoo Mail users to continue using the service for free. Forwarding emails from Yahoo now is unavailable unless you pay $3.49 a month.

Use an app or delete manually

Meanwhile, what can you do if your inbox has gotten out of hand but you don't want to pay for more storage? You could do it the hard way and delete like crazy. Or you could pay to have an app do it for you.

The app Mailstrom starts with a free two-week trial, no credit card required, to delete up to 2,500 emails for you. After that it's $14 a month to keep the deleting going. In other words, Mailstrom does the deleting so you don't have to.

The app finds the emails that show up most frequently — Google alerts, offers from local stores and the like. Once rounded up, you get to approve their bulk deletion.

Or you could try it the free way, searching for your most frequent emailers such as Google alerts and stores that nag you about their latest sale. Once displayed, click select all and delete them all.

What makes it hard is that Google lets you look at only 100 emails at a time, Greer says. Many people have way more email in their inbox, including this author, who has more than 60,000 unread ones.