What do you do with your email? Do you archive everything? Or are you a person who will delete everything not immediately useful? There are good arguments for both sides.

Personally, I try to delete most email. Most of my email ends up being passive information that is point-in-time based, but not really long term. These are things like mailing list messages or notifications from services and stuff from my son’s school. Things that don’t often need to be retrieved because they’re only about the point in time when they were sent.

I do archive quite a bit of email, though. Things like replies to job offers, receipts, license keys and emails from my wife and family. Those are things that I would likely have a reason to reference later. Otherwise, I try to keep it trim. I don’t really have a long term archival storage solution sorted out, but I’m not sure if I have a real need for something like that. There’s always EagleFiler if I were serious about it. I could also just File > Save As… and dump it into some folder. Again, I just don’t have a need to do it.

I kind of flip this on it’s head when I’m at work, though. Work has retention policies, archive mailboxes and other requirements. Honestly, I probably delete a vast amount of email there, too, but the rest of it I don’t bother archiving because none of my email is “record worthy.” If I need to save some information from an email, I’ll copy and paste it into OneNote or something because that’s the blessed tool for that sort of thing. Besides, I’m not paying for the mailbox or the storage or the maintenance of it, so let the pros in those position handle it.

I have a habit of being a digital pack-rat, but I’m also kind of picky about what I actually want to save. I go through fits of cleaning up old data that I’ve accumulated, purging everything but what I know that I’ll need in the future. This ends up biting me in the ass sometimes, as I end up killing more than I should, but honestly? Having sets of emephemeral data is sometimes a good thing.

What do y’all do? Archive? Delete? Print (🤢)?

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