One thing in an e-mail exchange today made me wonder because I encountered that statement before (very infrequently, but still).
When I referred my correspondent to information in a previous e-mail (sent some hours before) she wrote back “I delete my all e-mails after reading - could you send me the information again?”
Considering that, in general
the available storage space in e-mail accounts nowadays dwarfs the needs of even the most busy e-mail correspondence
if you don’t want a lot of items in your inbox, it is as easy to put mails in folders as it is to delete them
it is useful, in my experience, to be able to refer back to previous e-mails - both my work and personal accounts have tens of thousands of non-spam mails, and I can easily access information about issues/arrangements of the last years
and, in particular
my correspondent is not a paranoid sort (to my knowledge), and the mails in question had no privacy issues whatsoever
I am puzzled why the few people who I remember deleting their e-mail after reading would choose that habit. Any ideas?
I dunno. I never delete my emails. My yahoo account has 1800 messages, and that’s my throwaway. I’ve got 9000 here on this computer, and at least that many more on my old hard drive. It really does come in handy, believe it or not. I can find that recipe someone emailed me two years ago, and my wife recently had a wonderful time rereading all the old email conversations we had together back when we were just flirting.
Personal email:
I delete most of my emails off of the server when I check my mail from my home PC. Outlook has a copy at that point, and depending on who/what it is, I may keep or delete it (mostly keep).
Monthly backups to DVD are getting to be a hassle, since my inbox and outbox backup files have grown to something like 700 MB each.
Work email:
I file correspondence away in the appropriate folder depending on what project it’s related to. Stuff from projects I’m no longer working on gets blitzed.
I’m with you. I had ten or fifteen years of old email, for reference, in my Novell mailbox until my employer switched me to Outlook, along with a 1000 message cap (ugh).
Here’s my take on it:
Corporate cap on email.
Even with disk space being so cheap, the infrastructure for handling a large corporation’s email might be quite expensive to expand. Kind of like how a terabyte might be <$100 at Best Buy, but try to get an extra terabyte of SAN storage in a corporate environment and the price will be stunning.
Holding back the flood
Many people address every single email as soon as it comes in, often resulting in deletion.
Keep in mind that the actual percent of old email you reference is probably <1%
Does the person in question leave the thread in their emails when they reply or do they reply with no thread at all?
Like this:
Or is it like this:
The first way is what I see as the most normal way to do things. Then you can reference past emails in one email. Especially good if you have a cap on the number of emails you can store. But not including previous emails in replies AND deleting the previous emails entirely sounds really counter-productive to me.
It could be an old habit from the days when storage was not as plentiful. I used to delete my mail pretty promptly back when I could only store about 200 emails. That was a long time ago now.
I use gmail now, and I think it will take me about 10 years to run out of room at the current rate. What I do instead of deleting emails, is to have a label that I put on the majority of my emails (called “unimportant”) instead of deleting them. So when the time comes that I need to make room, those will be the ones to be deleted. I use that label for emails that I am all but certain I will never need to look at again.
I’m actually like this, and it’s only rarely that I have to ask for an email to be resent.
It started when I first got on the net in 1994, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I had a 3GB hard drive. Needless to say, space was of the essence, and I was getting rid of programs, applications, and emails every week to make sure there’s enough room for new space.
Nowadays, I don’t have that problem (although my 35GB hard drive is 3/4 full and that bugs me, anything over 1/2 is too much for me) but it’s a holdover from those early days. (Yes, I want to buy a new computer soon, my current one is about 5-1/2 years old.)
(I also never keep saved copies of my sent emails for the same reason.)
I know the owner of a company who does this. Multiple times he has asked me for a phone number or information because he immediately deletes all mail, even his business mail.
Makes no sense to me. He does print out any mail he thinks is important to put in the client’s file. I can’t explain it.
I approach it from a organizational standpoint - anything in my Inbox needs to be dealt with, and when I’m done, I delete it to avoid duplication or additional unnecessary stress that a full Inbox implies.
If I need to retain contact info, I make an entry into my Contacts. If I need to refer to something in a prior email, I make a Note of it, and delete the note when I’m done with it. If I know I need to follow-up in the future, I make a Calendar entry.
I’m really big into “a place for everything and everything in its place” It’s similar to clearing your desk at the end of the day, and in my mind, being well organized makes work move faster and more smoothly. YMMV.
You could just move it from your Inbox to a different folder, though. That way it’s out of your way, but you still have it if you need it. Or if you’re using gmail, you could archive it. That takes it out of your inbox and also prevents it from coming up in any searches unless you specifically choose to search the archive.
What’s the point? I’ve moved whatever information into wherever it needs to go - the email at that point is useless.
In addition, in the unbelievably rare circumstance where I need to refer to an old email, I just go into my trash folder. That never gets emptied unless I empty it.
Which is always a good activity for that super-boring day, when I have no motivation to anything useful
The problem, for me, is that i have received emails that seemed relatively unimportant at the time, but which i later needed to refer back to for a particular piece of information. Basically, with a few exceptions, i’m never completely sure that an email is so unimportant that i will never need or want to look at it again.
I store all my emails on my computer, and once a month i also back up new emails to a Gmail account that i reserve specifically for online storage. That way, if my email folders on my main computer and backup discs ever get lost or destroyed, or become corrupted, i have the Gmail backup. Also, because i don’t actually use the Gmail account to send and receive email, no-one has the address, and i get no spam or other unwanted email.
If I ever do find myself referring back to any of those emails, I will take the “unimportant” label off of it. It hasn’t happened yet, though - the kind of emails I label unimportant are those ones that are blasted to all employees where I work and are generally about bake sales or seminars you can sign up for, etc. Anything that is addressed specifically to me doesn’t get the label. And of course I won’t start to delete them until I get close to running out of space, which won’t be for several years yet. At that time I can safely assume that anything that is more than, say, a year old, and was deemed “unimportant” when I received it, and hasn’t been looked at since, can safely be deleted.
