Comments on: Open Thread: Do You Delete?

By: Starly

Starly — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:12:37 +0000

I never delete. I do not sort anything. Everything goes into a folder in outlook called Reference. Outlook archives Reference every 30 days to currentarchive.pst. I rename currentarchive.pst every quarter to archive1.pst, archive2.pst etc.. and start a new currentarchive.pst. I use X1 to index/search all my archived pst files.

I have a one-folder document archive also indexed by X1. I use Google Reader to search through RSS articles I have read. When I read articles on the web that I think might be useful again, I clip to Evernote.

Anything I have read electronically I can recall in a few seconds for myself or someone else. I search/recall for my own use several times a day. I use it to help others a few times a week. I have been doing this for about 5 years and wouldn’t change it for anything.

Starly

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:13:16 +0000

I keep up to a threshold. It’s not a hard number, but I know when things are just to unwieldy. Most of the time I’ll take a little while and sort through things and create and archive. then if I haven’t opened the archive in a while, I will blow that away. Haven’t been burned yet.

Where I get a little crazy is with the DVR. If the misses fills it over the 60 percent line my OCD kicks in :) and I NEED to delete some stuff.

By: Aaron Bassett

Aaron Bassett — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:49:49 +0000

You are currently using 589 MB (8%) of your 6611 MB

Nope, no need to start deleting yet :)

By: Marc Reidy

Marc Reidy — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:14:07 +0000

I recommend you get the free open source Sugar crm and store your crucial email info there.
Thats what I do anyway.

By: Judi Sohn

Judi Sohn — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:15:49 +0000

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.

By: Leonid Mamchenkov

Leonid Mamchenkov — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:21:26 +0000

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.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:00:12 +0000

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.

By: Robert 'Groby' Blum

Robert 'Groby' Blum — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:50:38 +0000

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)

By: Ivan V.

Ivan V. — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:40:23 +0000

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 :)

By: Richard Paul

Richard Paul — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:48:30 +0000

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.