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Ask HN: Is it healthy to have 20 years of archived emails?

8 points by dfee 9y ago

java-man 9y ago
what is the problem with 20 years of archived emails?
- dfee 9y ago
  Largely, the baggage of having 20 years worth of conversation at my fingertips that is largely irrelevant. I guess I could try and reconstruct my life with my emails, or of course, someone else could - say my account was hacked.
  - stealthcat 9y ago
    Well it's your data, you could do some data science and NLP to study your life since 20 years ago.
joezydeco 9y ago
How much space does it take up?
- dfee 9y ago
  30GB. It’s not so much about the space. It’s the baggage of having access to a ton of information. And the increased risk of losing my identity of my account was hacked.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    How is that "baggage"?
  - joezydeco 9y ago
    Which is more sensitive if your account is hacked? Emails from 20 years ago, or emails from this past month?
    - dfee 9y ago
      Flip a coin. I probably have some emails from 20 years ago that contain health information, SSNs, passport info, etc.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    If you're worried about your email history getting hacked, download the email instead and store it offline. It can be very useful to have a complete history you can search, but that doesn't mean you have to be keep it on a server. (Desktop clients are a great thing.)
cblock811 9y ago
Maybe if you printed them as a "backup". What makes you think having them is unhealthy?
- dfee 9y ago
  I’m not sure. Something about holding onto baggage of things that are no longer relevant to me. In the same, or a similar, vein I kinda feel the need to purge 80% of the photos I’ve taken from the last 25 years.
kleer001 9y ago
If you're asking for permission to clean it all away, you have it. rm -rf that sucker.
- dfee 9y ago
  I didn’t even ask about my last 20 years of projects - Carbon apps for Mac OS 10.4. Maybe I should just run `rm -rf ~`
  - kleer001 9y ago
    Hey, if you haven't used it in the last 10 years you probably never will OR a more efficient solution has already been found for the frame-work you're using now. Unless it's truly a one-of-a-kind genius solution that no one will ever come up with again...
  - kleer001 9y ago
    WAIT WAIT WAIT! Do some stats on the data before you blow it away. You know, just for fun.
borplk 9y ago
If you haven't been accessing it and are thinking about deleting maybe consider starting it off with the older half and wait for a while and see how it goes.
jason_slack 9y ago
I have 23+ years worth of e-mail. Started as Pine back in 1995, moved to Postmaster (on BeOS) at some point Eudora, Evolution (on Linux), Thunderbird, GyazMail, Mail.app and now considering moving to Mutt and pop-ing down mail locally again. Currently takes up about 46gb. I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc. About 4 years ago I had an old employer e-mail me out of the blue asking if I remembered some code that I wrote. I hadn't worked for them in about 15 years. I was able to send them all the e-mails I had from the project that spanned 6 months.
- dfee 9y ago
  Writing an email client and storing it I SQLite seems easier today than ever before. The challenge seems to more on the side of idiosyncrasies of getting other servers to give yours authority. Very interesting!
  - jason_slack 9y ago
    I actually decided to take a look at the project this morning. It still builds on OS X 10.13! I used QT for the UI and all underlying code is portable as well on POSIX systems.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  > I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc. That sounds like a fascinating idea. I wrote my own email client, but it uses Maildirs for storage (with optional IMAP support), and one of the biggest issues is that reading every file in a large directory is slow. (Well if I'm honest the issue is reading and parsing every file from a given maildir hierarchy.) Caching headers helps some, but if it were all in a database I'm sure it would significantly simpler. "notmuch" went down that route, and it seems like it pays off in terms of speed. The issue really is importing the mail, and making sure your database doesn't get out of sync with the files on-disk. If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!
DoreenMichele 9y ago
If you need to ask a bunch of internet strangers how healthy this is, the answer is probably not very.
amorphous 9y ago
I don't see why it should be unhealthy unless you use past memories to escape the present. I'm keeping a daily journal since 2005. I started this to document my thought process and to improve my writing. It's a treasure trove that helps me to understand myself better and to find out my blind spots. As memories are fickle I wish I had emails to give me another view of my past.

8 points by dfee 9y ago

java-man 9y ago

what is the problem with 20 years of archived emails?

dfee 9y ago
Largely, the baggage of having 20 years worth of conversation at my fingertips that is largely irrelevant. I guess I could try and reconstruct my life with my emails, or of course, someone else could - say my account was hacked.
- stealthcat 9y ago
  Well it's your data, you could do some data science and NLP to study your life since 20 years ago.

joezydeco 9y ago

How much space does it take up?

dfee 9y ago
30GB. It’s not so much about the space. It’s the baggage of having access to a ton of information. And the increased risk of losing my identity of my account was hacked.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  How is that "baggage"?
- joezydeco 9y ago
  Which is more sensitive if your account is hacked? Emails from 20 years ago, or emails from this past month?
  - dfee 9y ago
    Flip a coin. I probably have some emails from 20 years ago that contain health information, SSNs, passport info, etc.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  If you're worried about your email history getting hacked, download the email instead and store it offline. It can be very useful to have a complete history you can search, but that doesn't mean you have to be keep it on a server. (Desktop clients are a great thing.)

cblock811 9y ago

Maybe if you printed them as a "backup". What makes you think having them is unhealthy?

dfee 9y ago
I’m not sure. Something about holding onto baggage of things that are no longer relevant to me. In the same, or a similar, vein I kinda feel the need to purge 80% of the photos I’ve taken from the last 25 years.

kleer001 9y ago

If you're asking for permission to clean it all away, you have it. rm -rf that sucker.

dfee 9y ago
I didn’t even ask about my last 20 years of projects - Carbon apps for Mac OS 10.4. Maybe I should just run `rm -rf ~`
- kleer001 9y ago
  Hey, if you haven't used it in the last 10 years you probably never will OR a more efficient solution has already been found for the frame-work you're using now. Unless it's truly a one-of-a-kind genius solution that no one will ever come up with again...
- kleer001 9y ago
  WAIT WAIT WAIT! Do some stats on the data before you blow it away. You know, just for fun.

borplk 9y ago

If you haven't been accessing it and are thinking about deleting maybe consider starting it off with the older half and wait for a while and see how it goes.

jason_slack 9y ago

I have 23+ years worth of e-mail. Started as Pine back in 1995, moved to Postmaster (on BeOS) at some point Eudora, Evolution (on Linux), Thunderbird, GyazMail, Mail.app and now considering moving to Mutt and pop-ing down mail locally again. Currently takes up about 46gb. I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc. About 4 years ago I had an old employer e-mail me out of the blue asking if I remembered some code that I wrote. I hadn't worked for them in about 15 years. I was able to send them all the e-mails I had from the project that spanned 6 months.

dfee 9y ago
Writing an email client and storing it I SQLite seems easier today than ever before. The challenge seems to more on the side of idiosyncrasies of getting other servers to give yours authority. Very interesting!
- jason_slack 9y ago
  I actually decided to take a look at the project this morning. It still builds on OS X 10.13! I used QT for the UI and all underlying code is portable as well on POSIX systems.
stevekemp 9y ago
> I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc. That sounds like a fascinating idea. I wrote my own email client, but it uses Maildirs for storage (with optional IMAP support), and one of the biggest issues is that reading every file in a large directory is slow. (Well if I'm honest the issue is reading and parsing every file from a given maildir hierarchy.) Caching headers helps some, but if it were all in a database I'm sure it would significantly simpler. "notmuch" went down that route, and it seems like it pays off in terms of speed. The issue really is importing the mail, and making sure your database doesn't get out of sync with the files on-disk. If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!

DoreenMichele 9y ago

If you need to ask a bunch of internet strangers how healthy this is, the answer is probably not very.

amorphous 9y ago

I don't see why it should be unhealthy unless you use past memories to escape the present. I'm keeping a daily journal since 2005. I started this to document my thought process and to improve my writing. It's a treasure trove that helps me to understand myself better and to find out my blind spots. As memories are fickle I wish I had emails to give me another view of my past.