Open Thread: Do You Delete?
We’ve looked at the distinction between filers and pilers in the past (as well as the one between nibblers and gulpers). But there’s another facet of organization we haven’t dug into yet: how much stuff do you keep in the first place?
This turns up most keenly in email. Some people hang on to every message they get, filing or piling depending on their preference. But even many people who don’t bother to tag or organize their emails refuse to delete them. Others merrily get rid of old messages on a regular basis. What about you? Do you flush out your archive from time to time, or do you hang on to everything? If you’re a deleter, have you ever ended up wanting one of those old messages back? If you’re a keeper, do you ever actually use that archive, or does it just give you a warm fuzzy feeling?
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I generally don’t delete, and I do sometimes need what I’ve kept. I’ve even regretted as recently as the last several months having deleted or lost e-mail as far back as 2000 or so, which would have given me documentation regarding long-term business dealings.
I do file everything into folders. I don’t get completely in a tizzy about accidental deletions or leave-behinds if stuff won’t migrate or is on different computers.
Sometimes I think I’m ridiculous. Then I find myself looking up something old and relieved it’s there.
I never delete… I use pocomail as a reader and this program keeps attachments in a different older, so all in all I just save the messages.
My customers use Outlook and it’s not that easy there
Regards
I’m one of the paranoids that never deletes a single thing (apart from countless “George Bush added you on twitter!” notifications). I am too scared of getting rid of something that would turn out to save me from a decade in jail, or something.
Nothing I deal with is jail-time crucial though, I just think benefit vs. cost returns in the favour of keeping everything.
I never delete an email, purely because I don’t see the benefit in deleting it. It is an extra action (and besides it might be useful one day).
I don’t file into traditional folders either, that is a real world requirement. In the virtual world a couple of keywords will pull up an email quicker than navigating through a tree of folders.
It seems I’m the exception to the rule, as I always delete every e-mail.
If there’s information I need, I file it in my personal wiki, project folder, vault, or wherever it’s appropriate.
Normally I have up to 30 days to recover an e-mail from my Gmail trash folder, but one time I did lost a couple of hours of my time searching for information I forgot to file.
It’s truly blissful for me to have everything on its place :)
I’m a mixture. As soon as I’ve handled an e-mail, I do delete it – but I told my mail client to never empty the trash.
So if I ever need an e-mail, I just include trash in my search, and we’re done.
(Which, I guess, makes me mostly a piler. If it needs filing, the info gets copied out of mail)
I am a keeper. Now my email archive since 2001 when I started using Mac fulltime, is now around 75 Gigs. I have to upgrade laptop just to keep the archive going. Thank god for the Mac transfer tool.
I try to delete as less as possible. Gmail free disk space grows faster than my needs for it. The only things I delete are those which I am absolutely sure I will not need in the future, such as notifications of forum thread replies, notifications of me being added as friend on a number of social networks, cron job notifications which I didn’t have to act upon, and things like that.
Sometimes I wish I deleted more, because it gets harder to find things in all that crap. But sometimes I am glad that I haven’t deleted a message, which I considered useless at the time.
I keep everything that is from a real person. So very few newsletters or mailing list messages (since I can pull them back from archives) unless they are directly related to me.
I have a few Gmail accounts that are simply for old mail storage. Been doing this since 2004 or so.
For files, I don’t hold things nearly as long as email.
I recommend you get the free open source Sugar crm and store your crucial email info there.
Thats what I do anyway.