Spring Cleaning

It's Spring and I feel like spring-cleaning. That means archiving and backing up hundreds of gigabytes of digital documents and projects, but also cleaning out my Gmail inbox. Easier said than done. I have 4350 messages in my inbox, the oldest dating back to August 2005. I don't know where to start. I can 'archive' everything, but that doesn't save space and I have 1,6GB of mail (56% of my 3GB Gmail limit). When will Gmail introduce an option to delete just attachments from e-mails?