I keep all my email. Everything I’ve sent, everything I’ve ever received. I figure, space is cheap, and it’s nice to have a record of all my communications in case I need to refer to something later. I even keep all my spam, because I don’t have time to filter through it all, and I don’t want to accidentally delete something important.
This means that my mail folder is about three gigs - which, on a modern hard drive, is peanuts. At the end of every year I create an archive folder with all the messages from that year, to prevent my mail client from bogging down.
Some people I know delete messages basically as they come in, so that they nearly always have an empty inbox. I’ve never understood that behavior. Perhaps it’s some kind of OCD tendency, but every time I see them delete something, I cringe and think “Wait! What if you need that?”
I empty my inbox several times a day, and I never keep anything I’ve sent. To me, it’s OCD to keep them rather than delete them. If the message isn’t something very specific that I’ll forget if I don’t save it, out it goes. About the only folders of email I have are messages from my wife while we were dating/engaged and stuff for school-related business, and even those get pruned with some regularity.
I don’t delete anything unless I specifically decide I don’t want to see it (spam, abuse, occasional secret stuff like email receipts for gifts). I don’t even file anything - it just scrolls off the bottom of the page in my inbox and I don’t have to think about it any more.
This does lead to slight annoyances though - because I often don’t bother reading some messages (if I see one that says ‘eBay item sold’ for example, I head off to eBay to look at the transaction) - so I end up seeing ‘you have 489 unread messages’ and the like - so I occasionally have to select all and mark as read.
I’m an e-mail packrat like the OP – but I don’t save EVERYTHING. I keep most of the mail I send, except stuff like replying to confirmation e-mails, setting lists to nomail, etc. I don’t save spam, but I do look through it all closely before trashing it. I keep list mail that has info I want to keep, funny stories, etc. and delete the rest. Same for personal e-mail. I have an elaborate folder tree for archiving.
My inbox currently has 2746 messages in it because I’ve gotten really lazy about cleaning it out. My entire Eudora folder (application, attachments, everything) is only about 180 MB. I recently cleaned out the attachments folder, though, so before then it was a lot bigger.
I figure disk space is cheap, and I can often find stuff that would have been long gone from my memory otherwise. I consider my Sent Items archives a kind of journal, and sometimes I just surf through them, revisiting conversations and stories from the past.
I’m self-employed, so my hoarding also comes in handy when a client wants a copy of a document from five years ago or something. I just pull it up and zip it off to them, and they’re thrilled.
I keep important emails in folders forever. Important is re-set passwords, bill correspondence, membership information etc. Download pics and vids asap then delete the email they came in. I would say the average live of my email is about 3 minutes after I read it.
I delete all jumk, chain mails, etc. Mail actually sent to ME, I file in a separate folder which I never delete. Emails only stay in my inbox if I need to do something about them (reply, needed info, etc). When I change computers, the whole thing just disappears and I start from zero (not that that happens too too often)
Yahoo inbox - 4,808 messages dating back to 7/8/04
Yahoo “Old Mail” folder (manual archive) - 1,855 messages dating back to 1/6/00
Yahoo spam - 1,457 messages (keep in mind this empties messages older than 30 days)
Work inbox - 27,358 messages dating back to 11/1/04.
In case that doesn’t make it clear, I’m very much like the OP. I delete some stuff from my personal email (mostly things like Freecycle daily listings that are obviously no longer useful to me if I’m not planning to get anything from them). I delete NOTHING from my work email. It’s amazing how something from years ago can pop up again, particularly since I work in law, and old clients can pop up out of nowhere.
I’ve never really seen the point in deleting things. I don’t know how often I ask a coworker for something they may have sent or received previously, and they don’t have it anymore. Keeping old email takes up so little space in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t like cluttering up your garage.
I’m using about 10% of my gmail account. I keep everything I send and receive, with the EXCEPTION of messages which are simply file transfers (I of course keep the file somewhere else on my harddrive). I have a number of filters set up so that my inbox automatically sorts itself. I suppose I’m a bit OCD in that aspect, but I often surprise myself with emails I want to find 3 years later, and being glad I still have them!
This is how I do it too, except that I print the important stuff and file it. It’s kinda going backwards, technologically, but I don’t have anything backed up on disks and I lost my pin thingie.
At work I have folders for stuff I need to keep, but as far as my in-box goes, I hate scrolling. Anything that comes in is either handled, answered, or moved to a e-file.
I keep seven days worth of sent e-mails and trashed e-mails.
At work we have to limit our email inbox size to 50MB. At 40MB we get a warning notice and at 50MB a user cannot send or receive new emails, so we have to delete old or unimportant stuff fairly regularly.
At home I keep most legitimate email (any spam that slips past Mailwasher goes straight into the shitcan). At the end of the year I file it away and start with a clean inbox each January. I have emails on file dating back to 1994 and once in awhile I’ll go back and peruse some of them, sort of like pulling the dusty shoebox of of the attic and reading old letters.
I’ve got almost all of my email stashed away in .pst files. Everything before November 2001 got lost in a PC migration, but I’ve got everything since then.
It’s my brain. It’s all been cataloged and indexed by Google Desktop. I’d be so lost without it!