In this age of information, it is no longer the case that storage costs a bomb like it used to just a few years ago. I remember buying my first hard disk back in 2001, it was a meagre 20 gigabyte hard disk and it cost me close to $200. I bought a harddisk earlier this year, it cost about the same price, but it had a capacity 50 times more.

Lets face it, storage is getting cheaper, and so we allow ourselves to bulk up on even more items that we don't really bother to delete. Imagine one day, suddenly your parents tell you that they are moving to a place 50 times bigger than your house now. All that junk you accumulated in your room would seem insignificant and you could accumulate new junk without throwing the old junk away, even if you didn't need it anymore.

Its not really a sin to do so though. No matter how much junk you store, its still going to be in those few hard disks of yours. Even if you deleted your stuff from your own computer hard disk, it wouldn't make much of a difference to power consumption (the same cannot be said for computer performance!) and you'd still have that computer around for use even if you deleted everything.

However, if you think about it from the point of view of Gmail or Hotmail, this seemingly would turn a little different. Essentially, If you think of your personal hard disk as a HDB flat, mail providers would be like entire blocks of HDB flats, housing not only your data, but data of many others.

And what happens when you fill your house full of that data? Well, they could just tell you that there's no more space and make you throw away all your excess stuff like in the past, but, with so many other free HDB flats offering bigger and bigger rooms, you'd just move someplace else where its bigger. So they upgrade your flat and add a new storeroom. And if everybody did that, they'd constantly need to upgrade so you'll continue to live in it, because they need you for their survival.

Back to the main picture (and no, there's no free HDB flats), what mail companies do to keep up with the increasing space is they buy more and more hard disks to store all your excess, and they usually buy a lot extra, just so it never gets too full. Their monetary losses aside, adding new hard disks costs extra resources and extra energy, essentially a waste since most of it you're keeping might just be junk.

Would you buy a house and pay taxes every month just so that you can house every flyer from the property agent that you get on your doorstep every morning? I doubt so, not unless you're into the paper recycling business.

So take some time to clear out your inboxes once in a while, it helps, seriously. Plus, less clutter means you don't have to sift through pages and pages of emails just to reach the one you desperately needed to reply.

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