Junk data - Why my e-mails concern all of you!

At alugha, we don't just save a lot of storage space on videos, we go the extra mile and that's why mails are another big issue for us.

The mail accounts in our company have storage limits and there are always complaints that 2 GB is not enough and that I am just too stingy. Our accounting department constantly receives emails with invoices, documents... Of course, these attachments are then downloaded, printed out and "archived" for the tax office. In addition, there are always emails from Amazon and others about the status of orders and all sorts of other things.

Our accounting department asked me to upgrade their account because it was 99% full and they wouldn't be able to receive any more emails in the foreseeable future. So I decided to sit down with our accounting department for an afternoon and go through the emails and see which ones are actually still relevant, and which ones we still need to keep.

We went through mails from 2014 to 2023, by keywords, mail addresses, size of the mail attachments.... We deleted all mails that had already been dealt with and were no longer needed. We moved the e-mails we were unsure about to an archive folder for the time being. In the end, we freed up almost 800 MB. This isn't a lot. At best, we're talking about 1 GB of junk data that has accumulated due to the mails.

We have around 40 employees and about 10-15 of them will certainly experience the same problem as our accounting department. So we expect 25% to have 1 GB of junk data. So we're talking about at least 10 GB. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? Today, anyone should easily be able to "handle" 10 GB!?

I myself have used a G-Mail account for a long time (since the service was introduced in 2008/09 or so). In the last few months, I deleted about 20,000 e-mails! I am NOT talking about spam, which is deleted every day anyway.

How much (junk) data are we talking about?

According to Statista, there will be about 4.5 billion active e-mail accounts in 2023. I like to break this down again and say that we at alugha are not representative and that only half of our example is usually the case. So we're only talking about 5 GB of junk data per user. We multiply that by 4.5 billion:

5 GB * 4,500,000,000 = 22,500,000 GB

If we now break this down to common hard drives (1 TB), we are talking about 22,500 hard drives that need power!

Twenty-two thousand five hundred hard drives that were produced and delivered. That need to be powered and consume resources. Twenty-two thousand five hundred hard drives that end up doing NOTHING.

The problem with junk data is that you don't see it. It's not on your doorstep and it's not in landfills. It is hidden in all these little boxes, and we are only talking about useless mails here. Many people have accumulated so much more junk data! Clearing out the house is not the only thing that can free you, deleting old emails does that too! Give it a try!

And speaking of saving money, try alugha2go. We'll make your video multilingual for an unbeatable price, and true to the motto: one video - many language tracks :)