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Why keep old email?
It is cheap and easy to store email forever. My Gmail stash goes back to 2006. And, despite an annual culling of old commercial messages, bills, and other non-personal stuff I have over 5 GB of the stuff lurking out there in the cloud somewhere. I have no doubt that clever searches would be able to fish out information useful to phishers, and of course what I have stored in Drive might be even more valuable.
Recently I have begun to wonder what it would be like to just delete most of this stuff. Maybe keep just the last year or two, or maybe five years worth. My typical email search is for something from the last few months. Occasionally, I have to go back a few years to find someone's email address that for some reason doesn't pop up when I start typing. And, yes I know there are some interesting reads back in the early period, but is it really worth keeping all that junk? Are we just hoarders?
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