8700 Emails on Gmail! S#$tballs!

ON MY GMAIL ACCOUNT I HAVE exactly 8700 messages, including "sent". Nearly 9000 messages! Nine Thousand!!!! That's unfathomable. Could you imagine just reading 1000 emails? Yeah, now multiple that by nine! I also have a couple thousand on my local hd of mail.app. Email is a MASSIVE undertaking which is precisely why I've freaked out about adding the most efficient and productive application for processing it and doing it efficiently.   I'm interested in not living in the inbox, but also not having this byzantine network of reference folders.  I currently have 34 (thirty-four!) archive folders IMAPed, from "Income" to "Finances-Reciepts", to "Kittens" to "Travel" to "Friends" and 29 more, it's gotten ridiculous.  I'm going minimal and switching to one bulk archive folder.  If I want sub-folders I can wire it nicely with mail.app smartfolders.

Hopefully mail.app will shine with add-ons like mailtags, textexpander, and mail-acton. God, am I glad to be out of gmail web-email! That was total utter hell waiting for the loading, the ads. God that was hell. Mail.app with apple is bringing back the home team (apple) with email. Throw in rules and built-in smart mailboxes and things are flying. Best news is I'm completely done with writing 2000+word emails to people for free. I did that out of the kindness of my heart, but all my time went to emails. If some people are so that they won't get any 2000+word emails from me anymore, they can suck it big time. So this is an exciting era for me. Maximum 5 sentence responses, even to loved ones. I'm WAY in the "IOUs" for receiving lengthy thoughtful heart-felt messages in the first place.

What will ceasing all of me free eloquent, and articulate and widely acclaimed emailing habit do for me?

1. It will allow me to route my energies towards writing lengthy heartfelt blogs.
2. It will open up time to actually earn money.
3. It will prevent me from being a tool who gets used by people who just want a lengthy, heartfelt message.
4. It will enable me to not fear my email inbox, because I'm not obligated to spend 5 hours writing each email response and can just keep the ball rolling and dash off a quick 2-sentence response.
   
5. Exonerate me from email servitude and obsequiousness where I felt literally enslaved to anyone I knew well who sent me an email.
6. Best of all it will provide the freedom to redirect my well-liked eloquence and literary articulation towards actually bringing in capital (capital!), and creating greater piece of mind.

Yeah, in short, limiting my email responses to five sentences is a pretty damn good idea!

By the way, I have a great curiosity to know....how many total emails to you have saved in your archives?