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Ask HN: Do you keep old e-mail?
I've been cleaning out my e-mail recently, getting rid of superfluous newsgroup subscription emails, old newsletters, unimportant messages, and the like (GTD-style). I keep my inbox at zero, but only clean out the archive every so often; I have Mail.app set to send all messages to Gmail's archive by default.
If I'm honest about what I need to keep, the only things left look like they'll only be a few messages for sentimental value or product registration info, both of which I could export into a filesystem if I really want to keep them. But most software and websites let you retrieve your licenses if you forgot them anyway, so perhaps that isn't even really necessary.
The last time I went through my box, I went from thousands to a few dozen e-mails; I haven't missed the deleted ones one bit. I did the same cleaning of my old hard drives earlier, with the same results.
Do you keep any old e-mail? If your box dropped out of the cloud today, what would you wish you'd have kept?
- brk 18y agoI keep some old emails. I clean up randomly when I have nothing better to do. Other than a few reg emails, most of it is valueless. Keep many more in my business account, "just in case". I have to admit that I use Mail/Entourage (personal/work) as a hack database in that I will often search for a person's name or product name to find associated info (contact data, etc.). So that can lead to keeping more email than I probably should.
- pedalpete 18y agoPersonal e-mails, I probably wouldn't miss anything. Work e-mails, I could probably live without 90% of the old stuff. It's easier to have it and search on it, than deleting it though.
- mahmud 18y agoAll the newsletters and business-mailings I subscribed to, but ignored for years, became handy as case studies to see what marketing format works and what doesn't. If you kept getting pricelists from manufacturers/vendors, you easily track the market growth of things and gain valuable insight into the direction of a niche market. This is specially true if and when you pick up AI and data mining as a side hobby and you suddenly figure out ways to infer business insight from large corpora. I say archive them to separate folder and keep them away from your inbox. Sometimes marketers make a mistake and CC thousands of people. Instant targets for your own marketing.
- tokenadult 18y agoI attempt to keep everything I have ever sent, and all but the tiniest amount of everything ever sent to me. But sometimes my software deletes for me, or my operating system puts it "beyond use," or something. In general, anyone with a legal education, which was my most recent higher education, keeps copies of all correspondence forever.
- lacker 18y agoI keep all my email, because I use gmail and keeping everything is easier than bothering to think about it.
- chops 18y agoI use a separate email account for newsgroup subscriptions, but beyond that, I have every email I've ever sent or received for the past 7 years or so. Before gmail, I have my old thunderbird email files zipped up and archived incase I ever need them (doubtful), but it's there. And most of those would be business related for a job I haven't had for 5 years. But yes, I keep everything.