Yes. Basically this is just a really unsafe “I’ve read it” folder
I delete most emails after reading and (if required) actioning. What’s the point of having a couple of thousand emails that you won’t need ever again? I would add that I do keep what I consider critical ones.
I hate having a cluttered inbox. It grinds on my nerves (not to mention being hard to find things). I do usually have some important things that I want to hang on to for when I reply in the next geological age, but my inbox never has more maybe a dozen or so items at a time.
My Gmail account has just over 13,000 e-mails in it, the earliest being dated October 29, 2001*. I delete things like joke-forwards and auto-generated notifications (“So-and-so commented on your Facebook post”), and I delete most things that have large attachments to save space, but other than that I keep everything. It’s invaluable now and then, mainly when I want to figure out the exact date when something happened.
Plus, I figure all these archived e-mails will be an invaluable resource after I’m dead, when some enterprising scholar decides to write my biography.
*I know, Gmail didn’t launch until 2004. When Gmail debuted I had a bunch of old e-mails in Eudora, and a few years later, after some Googling, I found a way to import them into Gmail, as opposed to forwarding them to my Gmail account. I.e., they’re still tagged with the original sender and send-date.
I think I still have some mail from 1998 in my original Yahoo email. Yes, I still use that address.
I have a co-worker who does this; I am sure he is just as apt to post a thread “Give me an insight into the mindset of people who read emails and never delete them, keeping them around for more than ten years”
We both can’t stand each other’s behaviour regarding email. He has a “things are supposed to be this way” mantra at times. I guess for him it’s only proper that the inbox, you know, is really the inbox.
After some occasions of losing important data through this habit of deleting everything he has read, I managed to convince him to stash read, important email into another folder.
Why do I keep thousands of emails around? Well, first I am lazy. Second, they are excellent paper trail (and I was a military clerk; I need those to form a protective barrier around my ass) and third, it isn’t hurting me…yet.
Whoever these people are, can you convince them to work at my company? That way we wouldn’t have to spring for email archiving software to deal with people that have 30k messages in the Inbox and an 18 GB mailbox.
Look, I know that Google and Yahoo are practically unlimited email. We can’t afford to do that. Since everyone threw a giant fit when I turned on email limits, now I have to do this other stuff to keep it under control.
Just delete some email!
I have 225,964 emails in my email program (all locally stored, I don’t do IMAP).
Or did as of approximately May 1. Add a few dozen give or take that came in since then.
I don’t understand the “throw emails away” philosphy either. But then I’m a pack rat. If it does not hurt to keep old info, I’m going to keep it.
The whole works only takes up 1.08 GB (attachments are in a separate folder).
At work I constantly reference e-mails up to a year old. So generally, every December, I take time out and clean out my mailbox up to a year. However, I keep everything super-organized in multiple folders so it is easier to find.
Most of my coworkers never ever delete e-mails and then they have problems with storage space since we do have a cap on space.
we have a system now where every time we close our mailbox, all of the stuff in Trash gets thrown away, so we’re much more careful deleting now.
I am SO not a pack rat, however. E-mails do not take up physical space. Everything in my house that does and that hasn’t been opened for a year I want to throw out.
Keeping every read e-mail for years and years just-in-case? That’s insane. That’s the same mentality of hoarders and pack rats.
I read and delete pretty much everything once it is resolved. From there it goes to my Deleted Items file which is set to dump anything permanently if it’s older than 2 days. If I don’t need to retrieve something just-in-case within 48 hours chances our I will never need it again.
At work, every once in a while I get an automated message that my mailbox is too full, and that I have to delete messages. It seems that it cannot hold more than about a year’s worth of messages.
For my personal email account on Yahoo mail, in mid-December my entire inbox was deleted. I never got an explanation for it, and the messages were never restored. To this day I can only see messages that I’ve received since December 19,2009.
No. The right way to do things is :
because :
I also don’t understand the people who equate “keeping your emails” with “keeping your emails in your main INBOX”. Yeesh, doesn’t anyone every file anything?
I’ve got 40-some-odd mailboxes. Plus one hell of a good search engine (thank you, Eudora). Every five years or so I create a new “xxxx-xxxx Archives” mailbox and transfer all the > 5 years’ old mail into it.
What a silly comparison. It might have had a small amount of relevance in the time when computer storage was not absurdly cheap and readily available. But it has no relevance at all anymore.
I have every single email i’ve sent and received from the last 10 years, including all attachments. That’s over 28,000 emails. You know how much space they take up? About 1.5 GB. That’s right, i can fit all my emails comfortably, twice over, on a single DVD. Those emails take up about one tenth of one percent of the hard drive space on my main computer. I can spend $10 and get a 4 GB USB key that will hold all the emails, plus a portable copy of Thunderbird, with space left over for another decade of emails.
I have folders for each project I work on and for any tasks that generate a particularly large email storm I have a separate sub folder for that. I reference old emails EVERY day. If I have a conversation with someone and it’s not documented in meeting minutes I send them a quick “Just to confirm, here is what I understand the output of our conversation is”
The underlying reason is - I have a great memory but poor triggers. In order for me to access the memory of a discussion I need to see some form of note on it, and even then if I didn’t write the note it can be difficult to retrieve. Email is my life saver.
I worked with someone who would even do this with documents she had created and was finished with them. She would spend half a day creating a presentation complete with lots of images of chemicals that had to be drawn, then delete it after the presentation.:smack: Yes, this resulted in work needing to be repeated on more than one occasion.
A common conversation with other coworkers often started with some variation of “When was X? How did we do X? Who presented X?”
A common reply: “Y [no longer here] was in charge of that and ccd everyone last year when X happened.”
“Oh I deleted that”
:smack::smack:
Now I did work some place that had a 150 MB limit, which made it really difficult when working on multiple collaborative projects involving large files. Rapid-fire revisions could hit the quota pretty quickly. It was annoying having to archive off-server so often.
I don’t see hoarding being a problem because of the literal amount of space it takes up. It’s a problem because people have a mental inability to let things go and not get rid of things they can’t come to terms with parting with.
But if you don’t need to get rid of something, and it costs you nothing to keep, and there is no downside to keeping it, why throw it away just because you can?
I’m no hoarder. In fact, i’m the person in my house who encourages my wife to get rid of things we don’t need anymore. I do agree that some people tend to hang onto things longer than they need to, just because they can’t bear to part with them.
But i just don’t see correspondence in the same way. Where would we be if Thomas Jefferson had burned all his letters after reading them? I don’t flatter myself that my emails are going to be of interest to historians the way Thomas Jefferson’s letters are, but i think there’s some value in keeping records of the things we say to each other, both for our own amusement and for the edification of those who come after. And when keeping them costs nothing, either in terms of money or in terms of effort, there’s no downside that i can discern.
I’m also an e-mail hoarder. I have saved every message, including personal ones, in my work e-mail account since I started there in 2003. I receive probably 30-40 emails every day, and although I’ll probably end up reading fewer than 1% of them ever again, I can’t count the number of times I have had to access an e-mail from the past. I have a separate folder for every month and year so searching isn’t too difficult.
I get rid of them. shrug Makes me happier. That’s really all there is to it.