Mom's Gmail account is at 98%

Problem
You create a Gmail account for your Mom and a year later she signals that it’s almost full. You told her to delete those “funny” Powerpoint presentations she received but she didn’t listen. How to help her out?

Solution
On my current machine I have lots of free space so I decided to save her mails here. I made a new account for her but I didn’t want to log out from mine while fetching her mails. Here is what I did:

• I made a new account for her (System Settings -> User Accounts, Add). Set her password.
• sudo xhost local:mom (where ‘mom‘ is her username)
• su - mom
• thunderbird (without xhost you’d get an error: Error: cannot open display: :0)
• set up her account in thunderbird and download her emails via IMAP
• sort emails by size and delete the biggest ones

Read this post too (Thunderbird + GMail).

Update (20120227)
Mom managed to reduce her space occupation to 37%. What is this if not a full success? ;)

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