🔗 Archive or Delete?
When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I’d add my approach to the pile.
When it comes to email, I’m extremely anal. I’m a zero inbox kinda guy - my inbox is a place for emails to temporarily live before I deal with them. Once they’re dealt with, they either get archived or deleted.
Right now I have 5 emails in my personal mailbox, and 7 in my work email. I treat it as a kind of living to-do list. I get tonnes of email, especially in work (hundreds a day), so to anyone who says they get too much email to do inbox zero, I call bullshit.
Anyway, I digress, this post isn’t about my love of zero inbox. That’s a post for another day. After reading Chris’ post, I dropped him an email with my thoughts, but I decided to write them out here too.
Personally, I do a combination of both. I probably delete around half of the email I receive, but for the other half, I do one of two things:
- Archive it.
- Move it to my Keep folder.
Long-term solution
I have a clean up of my mailbox at the end of every year. Everything in my sent items and archives get moved to a sub-folder by year, then the oldest year gets deleted. I only keep 3 years of mail in my mailbox.
The exception to this is my Keep folder. Stuff in there is considered important and kept indefinitely.
I host my email with Zoho, where I get 5GB of storage space. Some people think that’s not a lot, considering you get 3x that with a free Gmail account. But 5GB is an absolute shit-tonne of storage when you consider that emails are basically text with the odd attachment.
With my 3 year archive, and decades of important email in my Keep folder, I’m currently using 1.19GB of the space that comes with my mailbox.
Sorry, I went off on another tangent there…clearly I’m very passionate about email and should probably write more posts about it. Maybe I should start a blog dedicated to email, just like Chris did! 🤔
So that’s my approach to archive vs deletion, what do you do? I hope you’re not one of those heathens who has tens of thousands of unread email in your inbox? If so, I’m not sure we can be friends.
When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I'd add my approach to the pile.