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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 ema

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..)

cortesoft 12y ago
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.
nirvdrum 12y ago
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.
- cortesoft 12y ago
  What email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    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.
- petercooper 12y ago
  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.

cortesoft 12y ago

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.

nirvdrum 12y ago

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.

cortesoft 12y ago
What email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  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.
petercooper 12y ago
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.