We're all communication hoarders | Hacker News Reader

We're all communication hoarders

aaronkharris.com

105 pointsakharris46 comments

2 years ago, I embarked on a project to clean my 10 year old Gmail mailbox to reach Inbox Zero, much like I have been doing at work.

The first few weeks were spent using filters to delete all the junk like Newsletters, Flash Sales, Social Media Notifications, etc.

The remainder was all the personal correspondence. For nearly a year afterwards, I would look through all the correspondence for a given month, and delete or archive based on how meaningful things were.

I came across gems like the following:

- Planning my wedding

- Coming up with baby names

- Celebrating my wife's completion of grad school

- Younger siblings getting their first jobs

- Threads with multiple people for planning a friend's bachelor party, surprise birthday parties, etc.

- Conversations with friends who have since passed away.

This stuff was archived and labeled "Precious".

I highly recommend that everyone go through this process. I plan to do it again once a year from here on out.

I went through the same process recently. I had mixed emotions about it, because I found a lot of correspondence that I'd have rather forgotten. I'm a different person than when I was in high school or college. I remember what I was like back then, but having a direct paper trail for the last 16 years was weird. From minute things like how bad my grammar was to silly things like stuff I said to sound cool. Of course, there was a lot of good in there too.

I retained some and purged most. I decided even if flawed, I'd rather just keep my memory as it is than relive every event from my past. It's sort of the mentality of just watching the concert while you're there rather than watch it through your phone so you have a video of it later. I'm sure I'm losing something in the process, but it's a gamble I'm willing to take.

On a side note, it was interesting to see just how much of the Web has changed since then. A lot of emails were just links being passing around and the vast majority of those links were dead.

> A lot of emails were just links being passing around and the vast majority of those links were dead.

True. I find it rather depressing.

I save a permanent copy (with full text search, content, and styling) of every article that's sufficiently interesting that I may want to read it later.

The thing the article is missing is that algorithms will hopefully improve along with storage capacity. That is, Google may be able to infer what is "Precious" nearly as well as you can. The question is whether Google will offer us that capability, or keep it for itself.

At the very least Google is now currently separating out stuff that is definitely not "precious". I used to never look at my inbox until they started taking out all the updates, newsletters, etc into separate tabs. Leaving my inbox relatively movement-free and with only very important things.

I think the technology and capabilities likely exist for Google or any other entity to do this classification for us.

But it's a slippery slope. Do we want machine learning algorithms to show us what to care about? Won't that somehow cheapen the uniquely human experience of sifting through your own data and correlating it with your memories and emotions at the time?

That's where we start slipping into the philosophical aspect of the conversation. I don't know that a computer will ever be as good at discerning meaning from our communication as we are - partly because a lot of the meaning is because we say so, not necessarily because of something inherent.

But could they get to 50%? 90%? I hope so, because the load is so huge.

I hope you're right, and that's what I'm getting at with "something on the table." Right now, the pace of storage is increasing so much faster than the algorithms to infer meaning.

Sometime in January of 2015, I'll do the same thing I do every January - nuke everything from 2014.

I don't get a lot of very personal email and most of what I do receive really only makes sense in the context at the time. I'm also not terribly sentimental about many things, due to my particular life history.

If it's important to me, I'll deal with it. If it's important to someone else, they'll let me know about it.

I keep all my email around because searching is so easy and useful.

So many times, I will find some reason to search for an old email that might not have seemed important enough to save at the time; I might need to find the date I did something on, or get the spelling of a friend's name that I never thought I would need.

There is very little cost to keeping everything, and I certainly see benefits.

My thinking exactly. I can't count the number of times I've benefited from having an old email I'd surely have thought I could delete. Things like:

* What day did I buy product X, to see if it's still under warranty? * What was the name of that HVAC company I got a quote from three years ago, and chose not to use, but want to talk to again? * Which room category did I book when I was last in Mexico, so I can try to get the same thing again?

All of these are things I could theoretically track down other ways, but having it at my fingertips in Gmail makes it super easy at very low cost.

Whenever I go on a particularly thorough cleaning binge I always find myself missing stuff over the next few months. (I went to Inbox Zero on my work email right before the holidays so I'll no doubt run into missing stuff over the next few weeks.)

On the other hand, the newsletters etc. etc. that I allow to accumulate in Gmail do tend to degrade search effectiveness. On still the other tentacle though, I think I'd find it very hard at this point to do any sort of meaningful culling without losing stuff I'd rather not lose.

My version of "inbox zero" is archiving everything, not deleting everything. Out of sight, out of mind, but it's still there in search if I need it.

The problem I have with archiving everything is the noise it introduces into search. That said, it's hard to know in advance what's going to be useful some day. I've never found an ideal system and I don't think there is one. I tend toward the let stuff pile up, archive selectively, and then do a broad brush stroke delete of the inbox approach.

Yeah, I note a lot of the people who say they hate having lots of old email at their fingertips never bring up the benefits of being able to pull out useful emails from years ago. I don't think they're lying, but their use case is certainly different to mine (and yours, I'm guessing) because I always seem to be that guy who kept an email someone else finds very useful. I have a paper trail for almost everything (and so does Google, but that's another story..)

As far as Google having your paper trail, I think it would be pretty naive to assume that deleting your email is going to keep Google from having a record of it.

Maybe I'm just bad at email searching, but I've found having a large corpus just means my search results get severely diluted. If I have to recall exact phrases from emails to get meaningful results, then search has largely failed me.

I tend to just use words and names. So if it's a contract I had with SomeCorp, I'll search SomeCorp contract. If that has too many results, I'll use the operators to scope it to a certain date or a certain sender, etc. I'm not sure I've ever searched for a phrase in email, it's always the "context" around what I'm looking for instead (a bit like regular Web searching). Gmail is particularly good at that though compared to normal clients.

What email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.

I used to use Gmail and never could get search to work well in it. IIRC, it wouldn't even stem words properly. I hope that's changed since. Nowadays I use FastMail and its search is pretty good. But unlike Web search engines which tailor results based upon your history, email search is pretty naive even though I usually have a precise context in mind.

The late Dr. Randy Pausch, of Last Lecture fame, said that his rule was to archive all emails, no exceptions. [1] IIRC it was because he figured that if everyone saved all their emails, it would would provide future historians with a treasure trove of contemporaneous research material.

From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of "spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed was harmful to your case. You can argue that you didn't purge any relevant emails, but that becomes a he-said/she-said issue.

[1] I believe it was in his Last Lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo, but it might have been his time-management lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blaK_tB_KQA

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence

"From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of "spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed was harmful to your case."

What if there was a policy to delete all email older than some cut-off age, e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?

> What if there was a policy to delete all email older than some cut-off age, e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?

You'd have to talk to a lawyer about the specific facts and circumstances, but in general:

1. If you didn't have reason to anticipate litigation when you implemented the policy, it normally shouldn't be a problem;

2. Once you do have reason to anticipate litigation, you're supposed to suspend any such policy and preserve evidence; [1]

3. If a dispute looks as though it's likely to turn into a lawsuit, your adversary's lawyer likely will send you a "litigation hold" letter reminding you of the duty to preserve evidence.

In situations 2 and 3, continuing with an automatic purging routine can get you in trouble.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_hold

I still don't understand, what could be the point of deleting an email?

Privacy reasons? If you are hosted by some company, telling them you want to delete something does not necessarily interact with their retention policy. If you self-host, this is not a problem.

Storage space? Of course not, it is cheap. This is related to minimalism. I try to minimize my material possessions, but for data, I don't find this relevant.

Making it easier to find later, for you or your heirs? In that case, sure, make a folder of "important" emails, have a way to exclude "useless" emails from search by default. But this does not imply that you should delete them for real.

Sure, it's an important and interesting problem to be able to find back the emails that matter. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to keep the others just in case.

Interestingly, I think that keeping everything can actually give us a much more fuller account of our lives. If were are able to create an AI that will help with the augmentation of all the data. I can really see something like: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ttep_ep1

Which is what Gordon Bell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits) and Microsoft Research have been looking into.

When they finally phase-in Deep Learning in Google search, the next step would be to apply that to email databases.

I have been grateful for my 10+-year mail archive many times.

On the other hand, there's mail archive rot too:

I lost most of my mail archive around 15 years ago when a migration from my Lotus Notes university account to several IMAP accounts went terribly wrong. And many mails lost their metadata and/or attachments during later migrations. All in all, however, my mail archive has remained very useful.

There is only one major issue:

I use Apple Mail due to its integration with my private CRM software and with Apple Mail, you have to keep your mail archive in sync even if you use IMAP. That means a few 10 GBs on each Mac I use - expensive storage in the age of SSDs! Even worse, if you are on the road, you pay an addition toll for expensive mobile data or (usually) slow data in public wifi networks etc. Backup becomes more expensive due etc.

Instead of risking all that data why not pay for a Google Apps account under a domain you control and make a backup using MigrationWiz.com to Google? Then delete all the old mail from Apple Mail and start clean. You can use MigrationWiz once a year to keep backing up your data.

I actually already use Google Apps for Business with my own domain name. For my mail backup, I use CloudPull.

My main issue is really mail storage with Apple Mail plus various backups.

Aaron hits on an interesting point pretty much in passing: Gmail's UI is pretty encouraging to the archiver vs. the deleter. The Gmail Android app, for example, has a "swipe to archive" feature that lets me push the message back to my archive with a single motion. If there were "swipe to delete," I'd probably end up deleting a lot more.

The real reason I save so many messages, though, is honestly because it feels safer to do so: It costs me essentially $0 to archive a message instead of delete it, and if 10 years from now, there's a little transactional email that helps me win a lawsuit or something, I'd be glad to have it. If I paid for Gmail storage like I paid for storage elsewhere, I'd probably think a little harder about the value.

> Gmail's UI is pretty encouraging to the archiver vs. the deleter.

From purely a support perspective it makes a lot of sense. You can't undo a delete but there is little hard from accidentally archiving something.

I find even my own applications that I'm much less keen on giving users the option to delete things.

There is a setting for switching to "delete" as the default swipe action. From inside gmail: Settings -> General Settings -> Gmail default action.

Please excuse my late reply, I've spent the last week deleting EVERYTHINGGGG

I don't really understand why this is worth thinking about. It's not like I can't have people over to my house 'cos my floor and couches are covered in emails. It's not like I'm signing up for everything I possibly can just to increase my collection of emails that I dream will one day be valuable. They don't get deleted because, well for no reason at all. It's just not worth thinking about. Worried about your kids not having precious correspondence to hold on to? Print it out. Worried about google having all your emails after you die? Pay a will executor to delete them for you. I just really don't understand how this is anything worth even thinking about.

Some of this could be solved if we could create "expiry filters" to delete after __ days.

There's so much "junk" in my inbox that was actually important in the moment, but by the time it's assuredly useless, a new wave of mail would have pushed it out of sight and mind.

Service notifications (outage report, terms of service updates, watched Github repos, 2-factor email auth codes, someone "followed" you), delete after a week.

Newsletters - delete after a month.

Also merging might be useful - Receipts - merge by month after 6 months (email templates for each retailer are pretty similar, group the items?), maybe export to google drive / dropbox and clean itself up from my mailbox.

The biggest culprit in an overwhelmingly large inbox is often newsletters which we signed up for but are no longer interested in reading. Unsubscribing from these can make e-mail a much more manageable and pleasant experience.

In the ten years I've had gmail I've deleted probably... 10 emails total. Archiving was one of the core innovations back in 2004 that made gmail be gmail. I don't understand the people who obsess over the criteria by which they delete vs. archive emails. I also don't understand the people who never do either, and have 20k emails in their inbox. The product was clearly designed to be used in a certain way. What compels people to go against the grain so doggedly?

You know, personal emails to and from friends and family is probably the smallest part of your gmail used space.

Feel free to never decide whether to delete those emails and keep them forever.

Also, worth noting, is that gmail shares its storage with google drive and google+ photos. So if you use a bunch of google drive/ g+ photos, you have less space for email.

see https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6558?hl=en

The relevant variable is not strictly the volume of communication, rather the density of important information contained therein. I frequently get annoyed by the heaps of redundant and useless verbiage that somehow makes its way to me. The medium of text messages (especially since smartphones have become ubiquitous) is probably the worst culprit. We need more incentives to make our communications concise.

This guy printed printed all facebook's conversation history with her girlfriend and gave it for her birthday. I don't think such a thing would be possible with other ways of communication.

His talks about it on TED talk during public proposal (starts about 11:00)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg6tgh7qprw

I keep all my email, back to 1997. I only delete (automatically) old mailing list messages. Why not? From time to time I may dig up some useful information I forgot.

I even at times run some scripts to get statistics from my email archive; for instance how many times did I send failed disks to Seagate? Which customer sends more support requests? etc.

I'm still miffed that Excite and Netscape deleted mail I had saved from the earliest days of my internet use. Mail from 2-3 years ago is dull, but after 7-10 it grows historic and nostalgia worthy.

I have a folder called 'important' that contains sentimental items such as my college admissions or my first research paper. I dont see why the author simply doesnt orgonize important stuff!

You'll probably tell me it is futile, but I download and archive all my mail from Gmail using Thunderbird, and make sure my Gmail account only contains the recent months' worth of email.

People still email me pictures when they should email links.

12 gig of email is a seriously mismanaged inbox unless you're hoarding attachments too. I personally have a massive aversion to deleting mail because I always believe there is that one message that might get me out of the sh1tter in some edge case NSA/KGB/taxman/exGirlfriend scenario but.... 12 Gig!? That's like 12 copies of the encyclopaedia Britannica. Nobody is that interesting.

I get 30 mails a day and with minimal every-3-months basic management (10 minutes max each time) I keep it under a gig. This is not that hard. Chucking stuff out ruthlessly is actually liberating, and the converse is that keeping all this crud indiscriminately is tantamount to a historic drag on your life.

That said, maybe those new 6-gig spindles have a life after all...

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