I delete junk and spam but everything else stays.
I have several different folders (gmail) and have archived mail going back…eight or so years, whenever I first got gmail.
I never leave emails unopened, however (unless it’s junk or smap.) It makes me itch seeing unopened mail.
I don’t tag or sort my emails in any particular folder, but I archive everything except things needing action or that I want to look at again later. I don’t like seeing emails in my inbox. It’s a compulsion.
Inbox is only for stuff I haven’t dealt with yet. Obvious junk is deleted unread. Other stuff is read & either deleted if junk, filed if complete, or left sitting until dealt with.
Nothing gets older than a week or so; the key to that is being realistic & not saving something because you hope to get to it in 3 days when you’re not busy. That not-busyness won’t happen and we all know it. It either has the importance to actually be worked, or it doesn’t and gets filed immediately.
I am considering eliminating my set of categorical folders and simply having a single ginormous folder called “Done”. So the inbox remains just new stuff + work in process and everything else is either deleted or in Done.
My wife keeps a messy box. Ahem. And it drives me bonkers, as much as it can, considering how seldom I encounter it. But the very idea of dozens of outdated and long-since-rendered-irrelevant messages just sitting there drives me nuts…
Joe
I have a clean inbox and a bunch of folders - I file frequently. After a recent bout of having my email address co-opted by a spammer or whatever it was that happened, I really cleaned up my act, and have very few emails left in my inbox.
I delete messages as I read them. I have some messages from people I communicate with regularly. I click on one of those and reply instead of creating a new message from scratch.
But I keep few others around.
Very clean. Tossers get tossed, Keepers and Temporary Keepers go into designated folders.
I mostly don’t delete anything, except routine emails that I get a lot of and can delete a bunch in one fell swoop. Anything important I keep, so I can (and I have) find them years later.
Generally, emails older than six months to a year get sent to a year-named folder for this purpose.
If there are more than a dozen emails in my inbox they need to be read, moved to an appropriate folder or deleted.
I really don’t get spam. My wife shops and forgets to un-check the little box that says ‘please send me promotional spam’ but I go back into those accounts and reset the preferences.
Then I wipe the whole thing down with Clorox.
I’ve never seen any reason to remove anything from my Inbox. If I do ever file something, I just use search to find it. And I will use filters to keep certain types of new emails from cluttering up my Inbox. The old ones don’t matter, as I’ll never see them again unless I want to.
I don’t think I’ve deleted more than two or three emails in the past ten years. My inbox has about 20,000 messages in it, including spam and whatever. When I need an old email, I can easily search through it. The two or three emails I have deleted were from people I didn’t want to hear from. So, instead of waiting for it to just disappear off the first page, I deleted them.
I save emails from my parents on the rather morbid idea that it will be nice to read through them again when they’re gone.
I save emails confirming purchases, then delete them once I have recieved the purchased goods/service in good order.
Everything else gets deleted.
I keep emial conformations about online payments till the billing cycle, and I have a folder for any Booster Club related stuff. Otherwise I keep mine clean.