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Old 28 Mar 2019, 08:53 PM   #1
TenFour
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Join Date: Feb 2017
Location: USA
Posts: 1,683
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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Old 29 Mar 2019, 03:36 AM   #2
beeboy
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I wished I had kept some old hotmail messages. I was new to computers at the time and sent my niece and nephew messages. My niece sent me a long reply full of big words and fancy phrases. The underlying message was "don't bother me I'm busy". I've kicked my butt for deleting that gem.
Today, I prune regularly but keep anything significant.
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Old 29 Mar 2019, 06:21 AM   #3
Berenburger
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Join Date: Sep 2004
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Quote:
Originally Posted by beeboy View Post
I wished I had kept some old hotmail messages. I was new to computers at the time and sent my niece and nephew messages. My niece sent me a long reply full of big words and fancy phrases. The underlying message was "don't bother me I'm busy". I've kicked my butt for deleting that gem.
Today, I prune regularly but keep anything significant.
Looking up my oldest mail: Sept 24, 1997.
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Old 1 Apr 2019, 06:57 PM   #4
janusz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
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.
The same goes for paper documents/letters/statements &c.
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Old 1 Apr 2019, 09:21 PM   #5
TenFour
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Quote:
The same goes for paper documents/letters/statements &c.
Not exactly the same. I try to keep about 7 years worth of the paper records and it is a large stack of boxes in the basement that almost never gets looked at until the inevitable cull every few years. However, email is easily searchable, takes up no space, is much less hassle to store, etc. But, then we have the problem that we are still storing a decade's (or more) worth of stuff that could potentially be stolen and mined for social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank accounts, etc. And, even though it is relatively cheap to store there is a cost. Instead of the email provider that only provides a skimpy 1-2 GB we must opt for the ones that provide 10-20 or even 50 GB. And then there's the cost and time of moving all the stuff from one account to another, keeping it safe with careful security practices, possibly paying for backup services, and on and on. Maybe it is not worth it?
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Old 2 Apr 2019, 01:12 AM   #6
janusz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by janusz View Post
The same goes for paper documents/letters/statements &c.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
Not exactly the same.
It depends on what one means by "same". Of course the bulk of paper documents is not the same as of emails, and the ease of search is very different, but the question "keep or destroy" is common.

On a personal note: some 10 years ago I deliberately [too much hassle to move from my then work account to elsewhere] abandoned some 4-5 years' worth of personal emails [yes, from a work account, guilty as charged...], from various correspondents. I'm still in touch with them from a different address, and I never really needed any of the abandoned emails.
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