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General Software Discussion / How much email do you keep…and why?
« on: February 01, 2008, 01:46 PM »
Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed several threads like these:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=11286.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7563.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7813.0
talking about email searching and archiving. I must admit to being stunned to see the magnitude of the email stores being discussed – tens of thousands of emails, multi-GB size mailboxes, archives and .pst files, email histories of 10 years or more, etc.
Perhaps it’s a stereotype of engineers (I’m a Chemical Engineer) that we can be packrats who don’t like to throw anything away that we think we might use again, but I guess I must be an anomaly.
Partly because of document retention policies where I work (email Inboxes and Sent Items folders are purged every week of any email older than 60 days, and mailbox sizes are limited to 200 MB), my Inbox is pretty lean. Right now my workplace Inbox has about 25 items and my total mailbox (all folders) is about 80 MB including attachments. My home mailbox is similar – I probably have about 15-20 messages in my Inbox with fewer than 50 messages in other folders.
My wife, on the other hand, has messages from last summer reminding us to send bathing suits with our girls for their Girl Scout swim party!
So I’m a little curious to hear why people keep all the email they do, how frequently they actually search or otherwise access archived email, and how they decide what to keep. For those that may have business reasons for keeping email, do they ever have concerns that they’ve kept too much (i.e., stuff that would turn up during a “discovery” process in litigation?)
I must admit that I do cut-and-paste bits of information into Evernote or into Copernic-searchable files, but email for me is a pretty transient thing.
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=11286.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7563.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7813.0
talking about email searching and archiving. I must admit to being stunned to see the magnitude of the email stores being discussed – tens of thousands of emails, multi-GB size mailboxes, archives and .pst files, email histories of 10 years or more, etc.
Perhaps it’s a stereotype of engineers (I’m a Chemical Engineer) that we can be packrats who don’t like to throw anything away that we think we might use again, but I guess I must be an anomaly.
Partly because of document retention policies where I work (email Inboxes and Sent Items folders are purged every week of any email older than 60 days, and mailbox sizes are limited to 200 MB), my Inbox is pretty lean. Right now my workplace Inbox has about 25 items and my total mailbox (all folders) is about 80 MB including attachments. My home mailbox is similar – I probably have about 15-20 messages in my Inbox with fewer than 50 messages in other folders.
My wife, on the other hand, has messages from last summer reminding us to send bathing suits with our girls for their Girl Scout swim party!
So I’m a little curious to hear why people keep all the email they do, how frequently they actually search or otherwise access archived email, and how they decide what to keep. For those that may have business reasons for keeping email, do they ever have concerns that they’ve kept too much (i.e., stuff that would turn up during a “discovery” process in litigation?)
I must admit that I do cut-and-paste bits of information into Evernote or into Copernic-searchable files, but email for me is a pretty transient thing.