I have to have less than 20 in the inbox. Hard with all the business and personal emails, but I delegate quite a bit. I have some important ones in archives, but less than 1,000.
All emails are automatically forwarded to another email account that is just used for archives. I rarely go in there, but it has saved my bacon once or twice.
I delete e-mails every month or so. I used to be selective about it, but a couple of years ago we archived all our e-mail on Postini, so I just delete older messages en masse. I don’t like the clutter.
He probably did burn all of his “Donuts in the conference room” and “Reminder: strategy mtg, 15 minutes” memos.
I have an acquaintance who routinely deletes all old files on his computer and then empties the trash can icon. He wants it neat and clean. He is over 70 and just plain weird about zillions of things.
That always astonishes me, too. People go out and buy a new computer and they just…start fresh. Tabula fucking rasa, don’t bring over all their apps from the previous computer, don’t bring over their documents from the previous computer, don’t bring over their emails… NOTHING.
When I buy a new computer, I spend the entire day erasing the hard drive, paritioning it, installing the OS, installing apps and daemons that need actual installers, running the Upgrade Assistant to snag most apps from the previous computer, drag-copying lots of auxiliary apps, creating folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders and organizing things, setting preferences in all my apps to make them behave as I want them to, hacking the OS (editing hidden settings buried deep in plist-land or issuing arcane unix writeout commands) to make IT behave the way I want it to, setting up my various launch menus for easy access to the things I want readily at hand, checking for broken aliases, re-registering shareware as need be, etc… it’s like moving to a new house. I spend an inordinate amount of time with this thing in front of me, it’s damn well going to be set up the way I like it… and that includes all my furniture and files and doodads from previous incarnations going all the way back to my Macintosh SE and System 4.
My friend is over 70 and is an organization nut that would drive Felix Unger to distraction. He doesn’t understand that computers can save everything forever.
A thousand times ditto 
It drives my husband – The Man Who Keeps Everything – nuts. But then again he’s the pack rat in our relationship.
This made me harken fondly back to the days of my first Seagate ST-225. I foolishly traded it in when the RLL drives* came out. . .
*RLL drives were basically a denser way of writing to the drive, such that a 20 megabyte drive could now hold 30 megabytes of information.