Years ago I started hosting my own mail instead of relying on ISP's that don't keep their promises, forward spam while telling you that's your problem and so on. I ran simple unix mail, imap and procmail on a linux box and that worked fine. I used procmail to cook up recipes for mail to go into a folder, filter out spam (and all hotmail.com messages as 99% of those is spam) and more. I connected to the box using imap so my mail and folders would be the same everywhere. Two years ago, I switched to Gmail. I started by forwarding mail to Gmail so I could always revert to my own mail or webmail (squirrelmail), but after a couple of months I stopped mail coming into my server and changed all email adresses into aliases. And I am still happy with this solution.

One of the most impressive features of Gmail is the search functionality, which is logical as Google is all about search and find. Lifehacker just published an article on searching in Gmail when you are looking to cleanup, and I just wanted to feed you this little beauty, so your day will start with a smile :

has:attachment before:2005/12/31

If you feed that into the search box in your Gmail, it will show all mails that have attachements and were sent or received before 31/12/2005. Isn't life great ?