Agreed. I have a fair number of rules set up in my Gmail (26 by this count, and probably half of them no longer needed) and I spend at most two minutes a day managing my inbox. Right now my inbox has a total of three items in it, all requiring action on my part. My spam folder is empty. I average perhaps 10 spam messages a week, one or two of which make it into the inbox, my rules take care of the rest.

I do have 32 "Labels" defined where I catalog emails I might want to refer back to sometime, and a quick look surprisingly shows that there aren't any labels I want to delete. Once in a great while I go through those labels and delete unneeded individual emails. After four years on Gmail I am currently using 9% of my allocated 7691 MB of Gmail storage.

Clearly my email usage is minimal and atypical compared to most of the people here, and the advantages of Gmail [large attachment sizes, simple off-premises access, quick response, keyboard shortcuts, etc.] make it ideal for me.

YMMV.

tanstaafl.