Not In Kansas Anymore (NIKA)

Email Out the Wazoo

As of today, I have roughly 186 megabytes of email archived. That's just the text -- it is not counting attachments, etc. Some of this email goes back to 1995 (I had email before then, but wasn't saving it). A few years ago, Nick Papadakis pointed out that hard drives are growing so fast that there's no point in deleting emails, or perhaps even web pages -- you'll always have tons more space to save everything you ever receive in email, so why waste time deleting stuff? If only the computer could do a decent job of indexing things, you'd be set.

I do delete some emails, beyond just the spam. But unless it's completely useless, or a duplicate email, I usually save it. A couple of years ago, I think I had about 50MB of email. Since I started throwing out less and less (and being on more mailing lists), that's now grown to 185MB. I have an extensive set of folders to categorize the emails, although I'd prefer to have them all in a database, so that I could have multiple keywords to index emails by.

Many people clear out their inbox as much as they can. I try, but my inbox currently has over 1,200 messages in it. Many of these are years old, and I simply haven't filed them. But I gauge my "upkeep status" by looking at how old the message at the top of the screen is. For example, in my inbox, there's roughly 40 messages visible before I have to scroll up. If the oldest one (i.e., at the top of the visible area) is at least 3 months old, then I feel like I'm doing pretty well. Sometimes the oldest message is less than a week old, which means I'm letting too much crap accumulate, and need to deal with it.

At the moment, I can see back to mid-June in my inbox. That's not horrible, but not great. My outbox, on the other hand, is looking great -- I can see back to the beginning of April - 4 months old! The oldest message at the very beginning of my inbox, though, is from 1998. Maybe I should post a weekly report on how far back I can see, as a sort of embarrassment method for motivating me to clean out my email more frequently. I'm sure no one else really cares how much email I haven't filed. :-) But if it's posted online, then maybe you'll all bug me about it....