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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

No. Yolo. (Also, in the past 20 years I never needed to find any personal email that's older than a week, so I'm not terribly concerned about the effect of dataloss.)

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I would have agreed with you until this year where a single email from 18 years ago, which I didn’t think anything about at the time, is saving me from being sued. It doesn’t matter until it does. I got lucky.

This is why I save documents like this too, but I've only had receipts for small bills come in handy.

If it's possible to give any detail without giving too much, I'm curious what the nature of the situation was and what the saving document was?

A company claimed my use of their software library was outside what I paid for, so they wanted 17 years back pay at a ridiculous rate. I had an email from back then from them saying my usage was within the license. It didn’t even occur to me they might claim the opposite almost two decades later.

This is exactly why I save all of my business email and I don’t mince words about that. I’m very up front with my customers that email is important and that both parties should save our correspondence. Whenever I’m asking for/proposing/communicating about changes to the terms of our relationship I always explicitly say “you should keep a copy of this email as evidence of [...]”

On the flip side, when a company refuses to acknowledge things like arbitration opt-outs that comply with the requirements articulated in the ToS (you know who you are), I email myself a copy of the Exchange trace report showing that the server never recorded a reply. I’m also usually open that I’m doing that, too.

Generally speaking records are an asset not a liability, unless you’re up to something shady. Generally.

My counter point is that in 20 years, I've needed to find old emails probably about 100 times.

I have almost every email of my life, so it's easy to find them.

I regular look at years old emails to check for things like who I was insured with for something or what SKU to reorder for a part. I like to backup with Google takeout for a "no brain" backup.

It's also easier if you already think of emails as "disposables", so if you have any important information in them, you already back it up on a different medium.

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