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How much email do you keep…and why?

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mwb1100:
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?)
-dspelley (February 01, 2008, 01:46 PM)
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As far as personal email goes, of course I delete spam, other than that though most stuff get kept.  My philosophy has evolved to agree with Jim Gray's (http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/) - never delete anything:

http://www.research.microsoft.com/~Gray/talks/Gray%20IIST%20Personal%20Petabyte%20Enterprise%20Exabyte.ppt

Obviously I don't follow this literally.  Things which are completely of no consequence get deleted if I think about it or some folder or something gets cluttered enough that I decide to throw out such things.

For business use, this may not be the best policy (due to document retention policies, etc.).  Actually I suppose there could be some legal ramifications, but I don't think anything I have or do will ever merit serious legal scrutiny (I hope I never have to test that statement!).

In the long term, I fear that much of this will be moot because entities (like the Government, Credit Bureaus, and Google) will actually have nearly all data archived in some fashion.  This may sound like SciFi conspiracy theory, but I think that it will come be reality soon.  As Jim Gray's slide #25 in the powerpoint I linked to says:

Soon everything can be recorded and indexed
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The only problem will be how to find the data you want.

suleika:
I have a slight pack rat mentality, so I tend to want to keep things "just in case" - although after a while it becomes clear to me whether or not I really want to keep it.  The problem is, that "after a while" can be a week or 3 years, and so where should I put it in the meantime?

Hence I try to sort everything into discrete categories, and every now and then, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I will purge a folder or two.  I still manage to have a 1Gb archive though, from 10 years of personal and (self-employed) business emails, about half of which I've never got round to purging.

Darwin:
It saddens me to note that at some point I managed to lose ALL of my e-mail correspondence from 1994 to 2001 and that big gaps have appeared in the period prior to 2005/6  :( Today I archive everything (excluding spam, "offers", and old notifications to let me know that my book order has shipped - once I receive the book I delete the e-mail) and back it up obsessively. I index it, as noted above, with LookOut.

jgpaiva:
I also archive everything i receive, including forum notifications from DC :)

I do filter it all into categories with opera, so that it'll look more search-friendly :)

yotta:
i keep all non-spam emails, i use gmail which makes i easy to keep everything, i might just need it, and i can search for it quickly, and its actually easier than deleting(you have to confirm deleting)

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