Gmail Storage Limit

“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I've reached my Gmail storage limit, currently 2768 MB.  This is something I didn't think could happen and it is really hampering my productivity.  I've been an advocate of Gmail and my blog review is listed in their testimonials, where I said:

• "I want all my personal data accessible anywhere anytime.
• Privacy concerns are overblown... I'm more concerned with     services that model me and my relationships without my permission or control.
• It's the best webmail app there is. Simple, usable and powerful."

While I have offloaded much of the work I used to do in email to wikis and blogs, my public position makes me a target for spam and genuine correspondance with new collaborators. 

While there are some good tactics for reducing Gmail volume, the solutions I want are not available to me:

• I want to whip out my credit card and buy more storage.
• I want to not only search to find deletable emails, but sort.  I can make a massive list of emails with attachments, but I can't sort to eliminate the top 20 files that are undoubtedly hogs. 
• I want to keep my user pattern of being a piler, not a filer, and relying on search for recall
• I don't want to have to offload my archive onto my client and end up having two seperate places to search

Unfortunately, for now, I'm back to the user experience I've had with webmail.  Constantly tending to an inbox at the limit instead of actually getting work done.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: A Google employee reached out and I can say with confidence that a solution is on the way.