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Comment by SanjayMehta | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago?

I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.

Maybe not “need” in the strictest sense, but there have been more times than I can count where digging up old mail has either made things much faster and easier or helped me answer a random question that popped into my head about something that happened ages ago.

Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.

Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.

Seriously? I keep nothing unless I have to. No chat history no emails. Even if I did I'd never look back at them, what's the point?

How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.

Inbox Zero just means to deal with messages as they come in, then move them out of the inbox, generally to an archive section.

If she was hard-deleting everything, she wasn't just Inbox Zero, she was F---s Zero, too.

I switched to Gmail in 2007 or so. I used to have a gzipped mbox of my previous emails, dating back to maybe 1996 or 1997 when I got my first email account. This file was lost at some point, and I'm really sad about it. In some ways, it's like losing years and years of a journal, conversations I had with people, how I thought about the world at that age, etc. It's a huge loss to me.

About OP's tool, I also back up my Google account to an external disk periodically. Gmail is ~8 GB so it's manageable. But Google Photos is a pain. They recently removed most of the useful APIs, so AFAIK the only way to backup is via Takeout. It's terrible. Pictures in multiple albums are included as copies every time, so I had to make a script to find duplicates and replace them with symlinks. Just downloading the whole thing is a PITA (multiple 50 GB zip files). I get that Google has little incentive to make this better, in fact they might have an incentive to make it as inconvenient as possible, but I really wish they made it easier.

I'm really hoping you're wrong about the removed APIs as I recently tried doing a takeout and about 1/3rd of every album I checked was missing. Was really hoping I could find another tool to get my photos downloaded and moved out/backed up.

Pretty sure they're gone, that's why gphotos-sync and the like have stopped working (https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync-discussion/discuss...)

> Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.

What's the advantage to deleting? It's easy to ignore anything old and disk space is cheap. Do you delete old photos?

I've always run my own backup systems, from 150Mb QIC tape days. It became a habit to keep critical things to the minimum to reduce the number of tapes required.

As for photos, I print maybe 1 out of 100 and don't bother with the rest.

My point of view is what's the advantages of keeping it?

I keep photos, though I don't keep all photos. But emails and messages? Why...

All the time. I read an interesting thing about someone online, and that name strikes me as someone I have interacted with. I search my email archive, then reply to that thread or start a new one to catch up. All of them have been super happy, “wow! You replied to our email from 10 years ago!”

I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/email/

I've enjoyed digging up an old flight itinerary to see how much I paid back in 2015 or just looking at the messages a company replied in support and realizing I'm not buying from them again because they didn't fix the problem.

Looking up how much things used to cost? I too like being depressed.

I have, but very rarely. I could count on one hand how often I’ve needed to dig back more than half a decade ago.

Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.

I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.

Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.

I backed up lots of emails that I deemed precious, but I still search through email first, because sometimes it's just easier to search email than to search my backups.

Also, oftentimes I search email not so much for the content, but to find the timestamp associated with a particular event. I have had to search old email metadata a few times when I get an unexpected question related to time (for example, gmail will ask when you created the account as part of its account recovery process).

At least a few times a year. Usually looking for old orders either model number or "how old is this thing" or how much it cost over time

"Five years ago" was 2020. What you're asking is, "Have you, at some point in 2025, needed an email from 2019, 2018, etc. (i.e. from some time before that)?"

The answer: Yes, of course. (And I don't understand why anyone other than, say, a university undergrad or someone younger should find that answer surprising.)

Near 50 and I can't say I need any email from 3 years ago; this is conservative, I'm probably ok with not needing emails from a year ago. Just like I don't need chat history either. What are you storing in your emails that you need to keep it beyond this? Genuinely interested. Genuinely have no clue why you'd be storing emails any length of time.

Not on gmail but a company I worked for sent me my pay slips over email. While I also printed them, I also forwarded them to my private email address and kept them to this day on a separate mbox file.

Also when I can't remember the age of my nephews or the postal address of my siblings I just dig the birth / move announcements in my emails.

I routinely use it to look what a given product I bought and paid for, and by extension how old it is.

Also to reminisce how cheap stuff was.

So, yes

Unfortunately, many ecommerce sites have nerfed their receipt emails to make this information harder for you to find.

When I was moving to Canada I had to dig stuff back from 6 years before!

That's why I keep all of them

Despite your down votes I'm completely in agreement. Emails and chat are transient and expire. Unless I need to keep it for, like you say, a good reason, then it's deleted.

The downvotes are due to my name. I have a fan club for pointing out hypocrisy in the past.

Yes, looking for old documents proving things for the government.

It has happened, but it's rare.

I let it pile up, rarely delete anything except marketing emails. Over 30K emails in my gmail inbox.

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