Email Retention Preference?

MichaelCee

Hey, don’t know if this has been discussed recently in a topic but I saw Jarland make a comment the other day saying he keeps all (at least business) emails for 5 years.

What do you do with your emails?

I keep most if not everything for business stuff including invoices, payments, confirmations and support comms.

For my personal stuff I do an inbox clear out quite regularly, password resets, login codes, “new message in your account!” and all that. Trying to find the sweet spot for what I need to keep and what I can put in the trash.

MichaelCee

Extra question: do you keep emails from accounts you’ve since closed or deleted?

I tend to delete them all apart from the closure confirmation. If it’s something financial I make sure to have statements and documents saved that have the same information.

ralf

Disk space is cheap. I backup every mail I've ever received, including spam. Except for spam that was detected and purged by spamassassin before it ever got to my mail folder.

Ympker

@ralf said:
Disk space is cheap. I backup every mail I've ever received, including spam. Except for spam that was detected and purged by spamassassin before it ever got to my mail folder.

What's best practice for email backup? I'm using Outlook on Windows 10 and just backup that using Aomei Backupper

bikegremlin

I think 5 years is a safe bet.
Though I remove the nonsense ones right away.
And I don't use emails for sending files or keeping sent files. So storage room is not a problem.
Though, I like using Gmail for email storage - lol.

ralf

@bikegremlin said:
And I don't use emails for sending files or keeping sent files. So storage room is not a problem.

Hah, I'm totally the opposite. I'll actually e-mail myself important documents, e.g. a scan of my passport or PDFs of tickets etc, so that if I'm on holiday and lose the originals, at least I can attempt to prove who I am or that I've purchased stuff.

mgcAna

You are not allone @ralf, there are whole lot of people those uses email as their storage. Even though we have now convenient cloud storage options available ( like dropbox), people still prefer email.

bikegremlin

Makes sense as a temp. solution, for convenience.
Not for long-term storage.

Edit:
I've seen people fill up dozens of GB with emails that have documents they wish to keep.
That's not so good.

MichaelCee

I kinda want to keep everything but it's hard mentally because I've already deleted stuff therefore I don't have everything.

Erisa

I delete the spam, but everything else gets piled into Archive (If I'm lucky it might get labels, otherwise we just hope search works..)

I have everything since around 2012-2014 which is where it starts to get hazy, when I change account I'll either archive the mailbox as a file somewhere or (more usually) migrate everything to the new main provider.

I don't think I get emails as often as some do, and this is all purely personal. There's 3.7 GB in my current main mailbox (Which I setup around a month ago, that was a fun migration).

At work they have a retention policy where emails are deleted sometime after a year, so I don't have much of a choice there.

cmeerw

I keep all emails indefinitely, going back to 1995 (with attachments removed)

xleet

I do the same as @ralf. I keep all email other than spam and ads. I retained email messages from the 1980s. They are searchable, which makes finding old stuff workable.

I did not retain messages from old self-contained email systems. Remember when you could send email only to people who logged-in on the same physical computer as you?

Razza

i regularly clean my inbox usually every few days, I do move important email like invoices etc to archive, I just don't see the point of keeping years and years email since 99.9999% of it I would never need reference to it at a later date.

MichaelCee

I'm gonna wind down from iCloud, not convenient to take backups for me at least. Hello again, MXroute

MichaelCee

@MichaelCee said:
I'm gonna wind down from iCloud, not convenient to take backups for me at least. Hello again, MXroute

An hour later I've migrated 3 addresses to MXroute and backed them up.. for a total of 2.1MB (compressed) data.

webcraft

@Razza said:
I just don't see the point of keeping years and years email since 99.9999% of it I would never need reference to it at a later date.

This. Why would I need a 5 year old invoice for my hosting when the legal requirement to keep this docs runs out after 3 years? Same for personal Email, would I really read those conversations I've had 5 years ago? Very unlikely.
When I order a service I keep the setup emails and everything around the initial purchase but delete the renewing stuff. When I cancel the service I wait a month and then delete everything of it. Yet, I didn't miss any documents.

tridinebandim

@mgcAna said: whole lot of people those uses email as their storage.

i remembered the years when Gmail was used to share ISO files. People so creative...

i move all invoices, new signup mails and important ticket mails to archive folder

rcy026

I actually have all my mail since march 1998.
That is when I first setup my own imap server and ever since then my email has always been stored server-side, just moved between different servers. Every new year I make a folder with the name of last year and move all email for that year into it, just to avoid having 25 years of email directly in my inbox.

Falzo

forever.

ralf

@webcraft said:

@Razza said:
I just don't see the point of keeping years and years email since 99.9999% of it I would never need reference to it at a later date.

This. Why would I need a 5 year old invoice for my hosting when the legal requirement to keep this docs runs out after 3 years? Same for personal Email, would I really read those conversations I've had 5 years ago? Very unlikely.
When I order a service I keep the setup emails and everything around the initial purchase but delete the renewing stuff. When I cancel the service I wait a month and then delete everything of it. Yet, I didn't miss any documents.

I think people just have different mentalities. I still have 30 year old bank statements, even though the balance on them then was probably less than the cost of a Big Mac meal today.

Nekki

I keep and file nearly everything. You never know what you're going to need. The other day, I needed a train ticket receipt from 2012 to prove my wife wrong on a point of debate, and I had it. You can't put a price on special moments like that, and it was made possible by never deleting anything.

MichaelCee

@Nekki said:
I keep and file nearly everything. You never know what you're going to need. The other day, I needed a train ticket receipt from 2012 to prove my wife wrong on a point of debate, and I had it. You can't put a price on special moments like that, and it was made possible by never deleting anything.

You will be keeping the divorce papers for a long time, I assume

Nekki

@MichaelCee said:

@Nekki said:
I keep and file nearly everything. You never know what you're going to need. The other day, I needed a train ticket receipt from 2012 to prove my wife wrong on a point of debate, and I had it. You can't put a price on special moments like that, and it was made possible by never deleting anything.

You will be keeping the divorce papers for a long time, I assume

I don't get to win many, she's normally a good sport about the handful she loses.