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How much email do you keep…and why?

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Deozaan:
Maybe I should also clarify that my description of my e-mail retention behaviors are for my personal e-mails, not business correspondence.

tamasd:
I got around 1 GB. Most of it is discussion groups - I keep 99% of those for future reference and search or research.
Looking for to have the In box as clean as possible, but the other folders are there just for the storage.
The non-discussion groups email gets only searched rarely (past purchases, lost contact info, ...).
I have moved away from using my mail clients native search function over to a specialized indexing software.
That's for personal email.

iphigenie:
I have private email going back to before 2000 - although I purge a lot of the "unimportant" messages and only keep messages to/from friends, orders, software registration, travel confirmation.

All the private stuff I migrated to my new IMAP service, plus I have all the emails of the company I ran for 5 years stashed in a set of pocomail files, although i think in a year or two I will can most of those.

At work I have a method where the inbox gets cleared, messages tagged and filed, things flagged for action - I delete a lot of the "furniture" email, plus i remove attachments, so I can keep it all on the exchange server (i dont trust local outlook files!)

Renegade:
I delete spam but keep everything else. Consequently, I have multi-GB archives of email.

This is a real problem though. Outlook simply can't handle large volumes of email (I use Outlook at the office). Thunderbird craps out with critical bugs that will essentially make all of your email useless garbage after so long.

I'm back to using Outlook Express at home because it is faster & more reliable than anything else I've tried.

What I would really like to see is an email client that had a much more intelligent design than "flat files" to store email. Something with an RDBMS behind it would be perfect.

This is one of those things that I really wish that I had time to build myself... However, building an email client is very time consuming because there are so many legacy issues that you need to support. Not fun. Fun to program and play with, but not fun for consuming large amounts of time. :(

Mark0:
I always used to keep all the email I had. Save for some sporadic pseudo catastrophic events (the ones that teach you to backup things), I has followed that ideal.
Now that I'm used to Gmail, it doesn't even be something I have to think about.
I just try to get my Inbox/unread folder clean, and archive mail as I deal with it. Sometimes it's more easy to say that than do that, off course! :)

Bye!

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