Do you keep all your old emails?

BrianD3

I do this. I have every single email I've ever sent or received since I "discovered" email circa 1998. I don't know how many messages I have but would guess a couple of thousand. They are scattered all over the place in several mailboxes, on hard disks, on zip discs but I can safely say that I have at least one copy of every email I've sent or received. Plus I have backup copies of a lot of them.

Is this weird or is it normal to keep messages like that?

BTW I don't keep spam, jokes, chain letters etc. Only keep conversation type emails. Both personal and business.

It's sometimes interesting to look back at the old mails to see what I was saying or what others were saying to me 6 years ago. It tells me that i have changed quite a bit in that time.

So, does anyone else do this. Go on, admit it

BrianD3

Kevok

Nope, do a clean out every now and then, only things I ever keep are important personal ones, or order confirmations/delivery confirmations.

UnrealQueen

I keep the funny/cute ones and bin the rest. Otherwise I won't have room for any new ones.

mike65

I tend to, all the spam gets deleted as it arrives mind!

On subject of mail, hows everyones utv server tonight?
I cant raise it from the dead....

Mike.

BrianD3

There must be loads of older, hardcore tech-heads around here who have been using email since the mid-eighties. It would be cool if they have kept all their emails going back over twenty years.

I keep the funny/cute ones and bin the rest. Otherwise I won't have room for any new ones.

I'm the opposite. I bin the jokes even if very funny and keep the talky stuff. Thing about jokes is a lot of them take up so much room. Like a meg or so for some powerpoint slide show of funny pics or whatever. The other reason I delete the jokes is they can invariably be found again on internet joke sites or whatever..

Whereas talky emails are irreplaceable. They are like recorded conversations, like snapshots of what you were doing/saying at a particular point in your life. They are far more personal than written letters in my opinion and are almost as personal as phone conversations or face to face conversations. And I also think they are more valuable than photographs. Photographs show what you were looking at/looked like. whereas emails tell you what was going on in your head. Photos are good to keep too though.

Plus if you use plain text each email will only take up a few kilobytes.You could easily put a lifetimes worth of plain text emails on one 250 meg zip disk! All the emails I have take up no more than about 15 megs.

I urge people to keep all their emails. In a few years time you may think "why didn't I keep those emails!" if you don't And remember to back-up wisely!

BrianD3

Exit

Nope, I delete them practically daily if I don't need them for something.

I cringe anytime I come across old letters and think "Did I actually think/speak/write like that?" It's just embarassing, so that's why I don't keep e-mails.