If there is one thing none of us dreamt would happen a decade ago, it is paying for email storage. Gmail, Yahoo Mail and many top email service providers today charge for storage space that surpasses their free limit. The problem lies with ineffective email management. For which we have found another solution – paid storage. Gmail currently charges $2.49 a month for 25GB of space. This isn’t the end of rising storage prices. While this may not pose an immediate problem, it will be one in the near future.

Emails grow over time and the need to manage emails effectively is a necessity. What can one do to make more space for their emails without having to sort through millions of old ones?

1.  Practice the art of “deleting” You don’t have to delete emails that have already accumulated in your account. Start by deleting the emails you receive on a daily basis. This will help manage and extend the lifespan of your free account for a long time.

2.  The use CLOUD storage associated with your email accounts. Move emails that contain important documents, photos and other files to cloud storages such as Skydrive, Dropbox, Google Drive etc. and delete the mails off your account.

3.  Segregate email accounts Try to maintain email accounts strictly by purpose. Distinguishing official email from family and shopping makes a world of a difference.

4.  Create a “new” account If your email address is already running out of storage, create a new email account for newer emails synced from your old account. This will not only save space, it will also retain your old email address while sending out emails and not hog space in your old email account.

5.  External hard drives This method may still work for those photos or files you don’t mind keeping on an external hard drive. It may not be much to start with. In time, you will notice a huge change.

6.  Unsubscribe Do unsubscribe from the newsletters you have been wanting to get rid of for ages but never got around to. Simply unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters can save tons of email space. Especially those dailies.

These handful of tips and the effective use of “cloud” or virtual online storage will help keep out the spam and make space for storing what’s really important.