One in ten people never delete emails, are you an email hoarder? | Hacker News Reader

One in ten people never delete emails, are you an email hoarder?

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When you delete your trash in Gmail the following message appears when all the trash messages have been removed.

"Who needs to delete when you have so much storage?!"

I saw this message the first day I started using Gmail back when invites were selling for $50 a pop on Ebay. I guess I continued to follow that idea.

It does seem pointless to delete messages. Being able to access old messages is helpful. However, I find that I rarely have to access messages which are more than a few months old unless I have a project which has been going that long.

I suppose there are better methods to organize important information than just leaving things in email for later access, though Gmail search is damn good.

I thought the same but in my experience, I've rarely, if ever, had the need to search for email. When I did (super rare), I found that the search function in gmail was mostly busted. Sometimes it would omit results for email that is clearly there that match specific queries or filters. I'd have to try several different methods and even manually going back at times to get the email in question. In the end, having it overloaded with email was more of a pain for those instances where I needed to find a specific email.

Sometime towards the end of last year, I decided to wipe my entire email record (which was a lot) and start from a clean slate. Since then, I made an effort to delete any unimportant emails instantly, file the important ones I think I may need to keep, and tag temp emails that needs to be there but would be deleted once they serve their purpose (for example, online orders for items shipped).

For several months now, I've managed to keep my entire email account under 50 emails. It makes managing it much easier and great for emails I would need. This of course is base on my habits. I never really have a need to pull up the majority of old emails and leaving it there is just unnecessary clutter (personal opinion).

This is the direction I would like to go when I get the time to do it. Probably I will first do a backup of all my messages and setup some sort of searchable archive for them. Then delete all new messages, but saving to a different format anything which I believe will be important for the future.

Another issue which has prompted me to think in this direction is the change in information handling by Google. It may not be better or worse than before, but it still got me thinking about keeping my email well pruned.

With Gmail I don't really see any point. "Archive" is easier. Besides, it's handy to pull up conversations from several years ago ("I didn't tell you to do X!" "Yes you did, on January 7, 2007" etc) to dig up information you or other people have lost. I lean on e-mails of over a year old at least a few times a week.

People who never delete (incoming) emails could just be lawyers. The lawyers' saying is, "Never discard a letter from anyone. Never write a letter to anyone." In other words, watch other people's on-record words and try not to leave any of your own.

Are these the same lawyers who advise companies to have a retention policy which throws away all documents more than 90 days old? I speak here specifically of JWZ's description of Mozilla's internal policies at http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html .

Ahh, I understand. Your 'anyone' is 'anyone outside the company."

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