I save pretty much all my email, and it fills up my hard drive, my backups, and my Gmail account. I rarely go back and read it, though sometimes it *is* a valuable reference source.
I’ve been thinking of linking my Blackberry to my email so deleting a message on the Blackberry once I’ve handled it will also delete it from my online inbox. That will likely result in me trashing about 97% of what I currently save.
But is that a bad thing? I recently purged my Gmail account of several gigabytes of old email and haven’t noticed any particular problems from that. And phone calls and voicemail get purged regularly and I don’t miss them. What do you think?
What do you do with email you’ve read?
I save every single e-mail that isn’t obvious spam or some notice of activation/following/friend request from a social networking site. You never know when you’ll need the information again, and I can’t tell you how many times this practice has saved my tail.
I’m the station manager of our student radio station, and when I was internet director a few years ago, I created GMail accounts for all 12 director positions. New students fill these positions each year, but this way the e-mail accounts stay the same, and all the information exchanged by the previous director is still there. It’s a great way to archive station progress and preserve contact information.
Apart from invoices I pretty much read it, reply to it and delete it. After 10+ years of email my total mailbox is 4.9Mb
I’m a pack rat who leaves a copy of everything on gmail. If it’s not affecting system performance, costing me anything, why delete?
I delete txt messages on my phone because it has limited storage.
R.A.F.T
Refer
Act
File
Toss
I am a save e-mail by default type of guy. I save and search through it. I delete the marketing pitches, news alerts, and other items that have limited time value. But e-mail for the most part for me is searchable past conversations.
For work, having a 2 year old e-mail to verify an old request that was changed with out notification has saved my behind on many occasions.
I use gMail for listserves, I don’t read the ones I have been active in for years, but archive them and search as needed. I find it a much better use of my time than reading things that are being rehashed for the 473rd time.
I nuke voicemail (other than ones that touch my heart) as it is not searchable or useful after listening.
I delete it all!
I used to save and file but found that the saving and filing was a big time sink with little ROI.
If I have a message I need to save for some reason, I handle it by either:
• saving it as a note in Remember the Milk, associated with a task.
• printing a hard copy to associate with a file (usually a client)
• “printing” it to a pdf and associating it with a file
• “printing” it to Yojimbo.
Occasionally, I end up searching trash or sent mail to retrieve something but not often.
Best wishes,
Tara
I save email I think I will reference again. Usually that type of stuff is dated and contains info I will need for a meeting or concert. The problem is that once the event has passed, I forget to go back in to delete the outdated emails.
I am a public school music teacher and get email from colleagues, parents, and students – usually more than I time to read in a day. I have a more difficult time managing how long I spend reading and responding to email!!
It depends on what kind of e-mail it is. For my personal e-mail, I generally file it once I’ve read it. Then I perform a monthly purge where everything that is more than two months old gets deleted except for newsy-type letters from friends and relatives (but those ridiculous forwards go to the trash heap). Financial-related stuff I keep for a year, and it gets purged annually.
At work, however, I never know when I might need to refer to something later on. So I file stuff related to ongoing projects and make heavy use of Gmail’s archive feature for completed projects. That way, those e-mails are still available, but out of the way.
I have email going back to 1995. Does that answer your question?
In terms of email retention I utilize 3 different methods to prevent death by drowning.
I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird which automatically moves all junk mail to a folder that I review once a week. It empties itself automatically on a weekly basis.
Personal folders keep everything that I am keeping organized. These folders never automatically delete, but if a message sits more than a month in my inbox it is auto deleted too.
Anything extremely important i print to a PDF using Cute PDF (free print to PDF program) and that file is saved on my hard drive.
This organization keeps me sane.
I use gmail for my personal, precisely so I can save it without it getting in my way.
Even so, for a long time I let it pile up in my inbox. The downside there is it makes it harder to focus on just the important things, so I’ve taken to archiving things as I read them — no more work, just a different button. On my iPhone, this translates as “deletion”, the way I have it configured.
On my work Outlook account, I have replaced deletion (which I never did, for reasons I’ll get to) with moving to an @Archive folder. (The ‘@’ sorts it near the top making it easier to move to on my iPhone).
I also have @Action and @Waiting folders in both environments.
The reason for not deleting, is that I really do go back and search for things — often EXTREMELY CRITICAL things. The problem is, that the percentage of things I’ll ever need to refer to is extremely low — but I absolutely need those few things. The amount of work involved in filing is prohibitive. I’ve tried extensive filing systems in the past — and not only do you have to do a lot of work, and a lot of quick trade-offs as to how to classify (that’s why Gmail’s labels are a win over folders) — but once you HAVE classified it, if you ever need to find it, you STILL have a major search project ahead of you.
The only filing I find worthwhile is short-term filing — things you specifically need to act on this week. Longer than that, you’re probably better off calendering it, and getting a reminder. Things you have to do at a specific time this week, likewise.
I save most of my emails until my folders are bursting. Then I get sick of staring at the mess and order my program to purge all emails older than such-and-such a date. Suddenly my computer becomes speedy and frisky again! Why don’t I just automate it and be done with it? Hmmmm…
Incidentally, saving emails for me is rarely helpful. I get hundreds of emails a day, so even with extensive filtering and search utilities, it’s extremely difficult to find anything. Instead, if it’s an action item, I simply copy/paste the email text into my Notebook (www.circusponies.com – a very satisfied customer!)
Rach
Thanks for posting the question. Lots of good ideas.
I am an anti-pack-rat. I love the feeling of getting rid of things. But I don’t often have time to go through all my email and do that.
For obvious crap, I delete right away.
For important stuff, I archive right away.
For things I might need for just a while (receipts for online purchases I haven’t received yet, emails about sales I might want to check out, etc.), I have a folder called “Keep for 3 months”. I don’t actually go through it often, but when I do, I know I can just safely delete anything in it that is more than 3 months old.
Personal email is deleted with extreem prejudice after reading.
Work email however is archived to an offline folder on a weekly basis (including trash), and frequently searched against. I’m not a big Microsoft fan, but their desktop search being able to parse offline pst files is HUGE.
I come from an Administrative Assistant background, where the rule is CYA: Cover your @$$.
You never know when you’ll need to refer to something someone told you, something you were promised, or important information you thought you’d never again need. I keep it all. Backed up in multiple locations, too.
Work – my Inbox is always empty. Items are reviewed quickly and dragged to: Trash, Archive, @Action, @Waiting, or @Defer. Throughout the day I work from my Action and Waiting folders. I like having only one archive folder for each year, as it is easier to search and sort by date, sender, subject, etc when I need to reference something.
Personal – I archive most e-mails, but trash just as many. I keep the Inbox empty, aside from items I need to take immediate action on, or items I am waiting briefly for (such as a confirmation of an online order that I will delete once the package arrives). I add items to the Tasks list that I want to take action on at some point, but with no deadline, then archive the e-mail to keep the Inbox uncluttered.
I have my work account (google apps for business) setup in IMAP that I access in mail.app on my mac and on my iPhone.
Google apps uses postini spam filter which does an amazing job of filtering. I have my junk mail set to permanently delete once spam is filtered to the junk mail folder.
I have an e-news filter that I constantly update to send mail I subscribe to automatically to another folder labeled accordingly. I check this and process at the end of the day.
In mail.app, I use mail act on to process mail into the following folders: @action, @hold, @respond, @waiting, and archives. The archives folder is used for receipts, serial numbers from software purchases, and important memos (e-mails that I’m confident I will reference in the future). Why only one “archive” folder? Spot light and Gmail search can find any email I’m looking for in a matter of seconds. Much easier than searching through a hierarchy of folders.
I have all of my IMAP folders mapped to the mail.app default folders. The only exception is the “Gmail” folder which I have mapped to the mail.app “trash” folder. This allows the Gmail all mail folder to be my trash can so I can reference any message that has been sent to me in past. This has saved me on numerous occasions.
I save about half my e-mail, especially if it has attachments or might otherwise be used as a resource. Nelson Email Organizer is great at organizing all this, and my archives are about 14 years deep, back to when I started using Outlook. I haven’t saved a piece of paper at work, except for my paycheck and expense forms, for over a year.
I saved every email since 97…
it’s horrible… and I don’t even like collecting… maybe I should get rid of it all in one big swoop… and the iTunes library with it. Start fresh.
If it is personal I will usually delete it if I don’t need it any longer.
For business I archive it just in case there is some legal reason I need to bring the email back to the real world to answer a question, cover my butt, or use for a new purpose.
I let gmail save my emails. I bought 10GB storage plan from Google a couple years ago and am now using 6.1GB of the 17GB I have available (huh?).
It makes me happy to know its all there and searchable.
When I was in a corporate setting, I would occasionally send out an email “hard drive crash, lost all my email, please resend anything important.” This was a lie, really, but would result in one or two emails, and I could discard huge volumes at a time and archive the rest. I also started filtering emails and only really looking at ones that were sent directly to me versus my being cc’ed and just scanning the subject lines and sender of the rest. (This cut my mail down to 5% of previous volumes.) I stored certain types of email for reference–like the re-org notices so I could navigate my way through who owned what when I needed something from them. I used to store my personal email on my hard drive and have it get regularly purged (~ every 3 years) by *real* hard drive crashes. Now I use a web client and don’t like the way I have to manipulate it to file, sort and search, so I don’t do those things regularly anymore and end up with a giant pile of not very searchable email. When they recently increased our email storage allocation to 100x the previous amount…eek! Now there’s no hope.
I hate keeping stuff. The day after commencement, I recycled every single note I took in four years of college. Felt fantastic!
Email I keep, but I think of it as the other swing of the pendulum. Kind of neurotic.
I have had numerous occasions when being able to prove something by producing an email from 5 years has been very useful, so I keep it all.
I have an outlook macro that splits up work and personal email and I move it to a separate filing cabinet so as not to block up and slow down my primary cabinet.
I have another outlook macro that takes all unread email older than 2 months (apart from those marked for action) and pushes them into the Outlook Archive (normally they wouldn’t get archived).
When the Archive gets bigger than 1Gb then I roll it off onto DVD, catalogue where I put it, and start a new one.
It’s a good balance between keeping it and tossing it in my opinion.
Kind Regards
Steve
I delete inbox emails after I’ve dealt with them, but save my sent mail. Once in a blue moon, I actually search for something in my sent file, but likely have some efficiency opportunities there. Thanks for making me think about this more intentionally!
I delete ‘chatty’ irrelevant team emails, keep good sources on file and save almost every client-related email in file folders in the left-hand column of Outlook. Outlook has a tremendous search function (as long as you’re looking in the right file so set your filing system up with some forethought). So when a client says, “Remember that email back in September of ’08?” I can deliver in an instant.
Very cool.