Email organization

• How long do you keep your email?
• Do you have a rule set to purge old messages?
• How do you keep your inbox from filling up with useless garbage?

Until recently I have had around 15-20K and climbing unread messages in both of my personal email accounts.  Similar to physical mail, only 1 in 50 or 100 messages is actually useful.  Some are receipts or something I would like to hang onto for a short period of time, but honestly most of those are pointless once they are older than a few years.  Any suggestions for the best way to keep a clean inbox?

My employer has a 60 day rule, which a lot of people complain about, but honestly, its not bad.  ALL messages are purged when 60 days old, and it generally keeps things from getting too outrageous.

Should  I just do a search for "-has:attachment older_than:1y" and delete all?

5 Archive folders. Folders have rules of delete after 5 years, 1 year, 6 months, 30 days. One more for never delete. 
 

Unfortunately, I am terrible about keeping up with it. So what do I actually do? About every 4 months I'll search for everything from a specific sender, delete all of it, and unsubscribe, and repeat with the next spammer.  I should probably just do 10 minutes a day for the next 2 weeks. 

I try to keep forever if the IT guys don't complain.  

We had a knucklehead at work that did purchasing and would daily delete every email.  

I'd call a vendor - what do you mean you didn't get the order?  

Then I'd ask the purchasing guy if the vendor acknowledged the order.  He never could answer and he admitted to everyone that he daily cleared out his delete file.  I told him I'd fire him if he worked for me.  

He was told to stop it and he never did. 

i never delete anything, storage is cheap and have found myself looking for old emails on more than one occasion.  

mtn said:

5 Archive folders. Folders have rules of delete after 5 years, 1 year, 6 months, 30 days. One more for never delete. 

Hmm I might be able to get away with the simplicity of basically just a "save forever" folder, and let anything else auto-delete after 6 months.

Suggestions on how to accomplish this in gmail?  2 different labels?  Do you use stars?

I have a multitude of labels for my office account. As I work through my mail, I sort or delete depending on who it's from and what it is. Everything gets deleted or it gets filed in the appropriate place. 

My personal email is kind of a junk mail wasteland. Anything important comes to my office email. Every year or so I select all and delete everything. 

For my 2 personal email accounts, I don't keep much. Taxes/resume/writing samples are kept in my "professional personal" account. My "personal personal" account, I don't really keep much. Concert/comedy tickets get starred until the show happens, then they are deleted. A few other little minor things. 

Both are gmail accounts, I just use the "starred" folder for things I want to keep. That way it makes it easy to purge other stuff. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

Dunno, I've set it up using Thunderbird and Outlook. 
 

I really think the most important thing is spending 5-10 minutes a day on it and unsubscribe from everything. 

Why ever delete anything? I sometimes go back years to find an email. It's not like storage is expensive. 

When I was working, a folder was set up for each project on the main server and every email was for that project was saved there.  That way they didn't clutter up individual employee's computers, and as mentioned storage is cheap.  It wasn't all that common but there were occasions when an email from ten years ago or more was needed.

At home I save every email from family, friends, and certain other sources.  The rest (mainly junk and spam) gets deleted daily.  I think the thing is to set up folders and then move emails from the in box ASAP and don't let them pile up there.

bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) said:

Why ever delete anything? I sometimes go back years to find an email. It's not like storage is expensive. 

Well there is a definite cost delta between free and paying for email storage.

That said, I have no issues with keeping important emails forever.  What I don't want to do is hang onto spam or miscellaneous garbage forever.

ProDarwin said:

Well there is a definite cost delta between free and paying for email storage.

That said, I have no issues with keeping important emails forever.  What I don't want to do is hang onto spam or miscellaneous garbage forever.

The email providers that I have used will autodelete stuff in spam folders after a week or two.

As long as you don't have a ton of people emailing you attachments, most peoples' email grows more slowly than the price of disk space does.  20 years ago I used to try clean everything up, now I don't bother.  Instead I tag and refile spam into the autodelete folder, do some other minor classification (I keep a folder for all of my "order status" email related to online purchases), and other than that I don't worry about it.  Every couple years I take everything in my inbox that's older than a few years and archive it.

What do you use for an email client?  I use Thunderbird, which has the option of creating local disk archives.  Gets the old stuff off the "disk I am renting" and onto one that I own.

I use the Gmail web client on various computers, and the Gmail app on my phone.  I'd prefer not to create a local archive.

I think right now I'm just working through a backlog of trash.  I just need to configure it so that if I see something I want to save, I archive, or label, or star, or whatever indication method I choose, and everything else gets cleared after 60 days.

I have been proactive lately about unsubscribing to crap, but some stuff I don't mind seeing the notifications for, I just want them to die on their own after their useful life is gone.

Interesting debate for which there is no "right" answer. 

If you run an email client on a laptop or PC then archive folders are definitely the way to go - I don't know if it's changed but when I was still working in IT the general recommendation was never to let an Outlook PST file get bigger than 2gb so I used to create a new one every year. I haven't got their yet since I retired. 
I auto archive all my folders every month leaving (I think) 6 months in place so I can search for the really old stuff if I need to. My ISP is quite good at detecting spam but I do run down the inbox every week or so and toss junk and duplicates manually.

If you run remote clients against the like of a gmail store then you do need to consider the cost of storage but I don't know what's involved since I don't do it.

Off Topic, where I worked our executive got a bee in their bonnet about document retention and our legal obligations. We found a product that monitored email traffic and stored a copy of everything in a searchable  SQL database. It was vaguely smart in that a multi address message was only saved once and for internal documents it maintained a link to the network file system. I only heard of it being searched once in the five years I was associated with it - to try and find someone leaking stuff to the media. IIRC the DB was about 5tb when they dropped it for MS SharePoint 

My former employer had a 90-day wipe clean policy.  After being burned once or twice I started printing certain messages and adding them to a file folder marked "Butt Covers".  

RichardNZ said:

Off Topic, where I worked our executive got a bee in their bonnet about document retention and our legal obligations. 

 

Interstingly, I think our situation is that the legal obligations for storing and protecting info are so insane that the company prefers to just burn after reading.

RE: CYA - I refuse to partake in that mentality.  I know sometimes its unavoidable, but if the environment is consistent about the need for that... no thanks, I'll leave 

I use Outlook and within it folders galore to keep myself organized. I also move emails from "Focused" to "Other" when I'm at a point where I'm waiting on things, but I need to keep an eye on it periodically to keep things moving.

I loved Thunderbird as an email client (it's search capabilities were much stronger than Outlook), but I have found it didn't work well with Microsoft Exchange.

As an aside, I wish there was a better way to organize texts, voicemails and Facebook messages. Admittedly, a few of those get lost in the cracks due to the inability to organize them.

For work, we use Outlook 365 and I create a sub folder for every project under my inbox, and I load the E36 M3 out of those. Every message related to a project (unless it is nothing more than the word "thanks") gets saved. I have several projects that last for several years, and saved messages automatically get pushed to an archive box of the same name after one year.

Home email is Gmail and I use the archive button. I also use unsubscribe and delete options constantly to get rid of marketing emails. If it's something like a receipt I'll stick it in the archive. If it's something from my mom with a picture I'll stick it in the archive ... otherwise it gets deleted after 30 days in the trash folder. 

Does anyone use HEY?