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I don't agree with you. Unless your mail volume is too small. In my work, sometimes I need to search some important mails long before. You read a message and it's not important in the current, you delete it, but someday you found this message can help you and you can't find it. You will crazy. Because it happened to me.

He never said he deletes messages, just that they aren't in his inbox.

I archive things I may want to search later, and star and leave in my inbox things I need to do later. Once they are done, they get archived. Often the inbox has no emails, but my account has 6k+

I started doing exactly the same thing about a year ago and I'm very happy about it. I immediately click either "Archive" or "Trash" on all messages that don't need a response, so I currently only have 7 emails in my inbox waiting for action. It's mentally quite relaxing.

Ah, a fellow GTD'er :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done