Slashdot Mirror
Hoarders vs. Deleters- What Your Inbox Says
BlueCup writes "You are your inbox. Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages. The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you." I always knew my obsessive packratting said something important about me as a human being.
And I did (and still do) fit the clutter definition. I currently have about 1500 gmails, and I long ago stopped paying much care to them other than scanning and letting go. Google takes care of the rest.
I have on file (old computers, old e-mail clients (elm, pine, thunderbird, on and on)) about 15 to 20 thousand e-mails, and it's always been a dilemma what to keep and what to throw away. What to deem important and what to forget. Ultimately I wrote my own software to manage my e-mail, wrote an inverted index machine (more than ten years ago, and did it as a shell script(!)). That took care of most of my needs and certainly surpassed the features of any e-mail clients at the time.
But with that system I had the added anxiety of modifying/creating/maintaining my home-grown e-mail management software. Sigh.
Now, with gmail, most of the features I needed (but not all) are provided and implemented much better than I ever did. If I can remember just one or two words from an important e-mail, it's almost always enough to retrieve the desired note using gmail index. I don't even bother marking things as important. If they're important, they come up.
From the article: In Greensboro, N.C., Internet consultant Wally Bock keeps his inbox down to a manageable few dozen messages. He credits his sense of order to "having disciplined parents who made that a value." . YOu don't have to do this anymore with gmail. There is virtually no difference between e-mail that is "there", or "archived". Of course there is a difference if it is deleted, but why bother? For most users, gmail gives enough storage to not need to distinguish between throwing something away or keeping it.
Also from the article: A saner way to pare down an inbox is to move email into folders, by subject or need for follow-up, and once a week set aside time for inbox housekeeping. Again, with gmail, not necessary! If you can remember a few key words, you're golden!
And, I wonder at this recommendation from an "expert" in the article: University of Toronto instructor Christina Cavanagh studied hundreds of office workers for her book "Managing Your Email: Thinking Outside the Inbox." One of her subjects, a finance executive, had 10,000 emails in his inbox. She advised him to simply delete the oldest 9,000. Insane! And dangerous! Let Google manage that, and avoid the risk of "suffering the consequences" for stupid management techniques.
Since I've "switched", my e-mail life has been virtually stress free, and how and what I manage with e-mail has improved my day to day management of communications dramatically. This is close to life (in e-mail) as it should be.
YMMV
Full of spam? :(
Let's take people from two different extremes and generalize statements about non-extreme people from that.
I have 1,215 messages in my inbox and all of them have been answered. I keep them because it's a "paper trail" for when someone asks me about it again in 6 months.
My inbox is full of ads for a bigger penis, to get chicks, to make lots of money, etc. I wonder what this says about me. :/
Myself, I'm a hoarder with organization. I save EVERY email somewhere (except for spam which gets cleared out once and a while). Things get filed away as soon as possible. I read it, then I file it. The exceptions are the things I want kept at my attention. Open orders, ongoing discussions, and the last letter from a select friend or two are always in there. If I'm done with it, it's filed. I'd have mail going back 6 or 7 years if it wasn't for a hard drive crash. As it is, it only goes back about 2 or 3.
Now the thing I finder interesting is my parents. They use AOL and are self taught. I've been moving them over to gmail but their habits have stayed with them.
The thing you have to understand is that AOL has this really queer behavior where if you've read an e-mail, it will delete it. If you read an e-mail and then leave AOL, it gets moved somewhere. After that, it quickly gets deleted automatically. I'm not sure why they do this, but it is the behavior I've seen. So if you want to keep an e-mail, you have two options. You can save it somewhere in another folder (which they do sometimes), or you can click "keep as new" (marks the message unread). So anything they think they'll read again gets marked "keep as new". This means they always have "new" mail. They can't look and see "I have 2 new messages" because they are ALL new messages (so they would have to remember the previous number).
But by and large they are deleters. When they are done with an e-mail unless they think they have a good reason to save it, they just let it get deleted (or recently they have been speeding it up by pressing delete).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I get roughly 5-10 personal e-mails on a daily basis in my gmail inbox(not including responses). I keep every e-mail. I respond to most. It keeps a trail of what has been said and done so 2 years later when someone asks if you have that program that they sent you, you can say YES. All you have to do (in gmail at least) is perform a search. I'm a supporter of not deleting e-mails. It gives you deniability and you never have to think "Darn, I wish I had that file that John Q. Nobody e-mailed me"
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
answers all 250 emails per day, organizes them, and archives 'em? :)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have that problem not with e-mail but with media I have downloaded. Instead of watching TV through cable I download TV shows and I find that even though I will never watch the series again I keep all the episodes. I have even bought larger hard drives and now have 750GB of space. This is a total waste of money but I find I can't delete them. I suposse its related to collecting things like beenie babies or spoons or whatever.
Keeping your inbox empty (and generally being organized) is a skill that some people have naturally, and others don't. Those that don't, can learn it quite easily.
:-)
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
And for some reason these people say that being disorganized is being "creative" or something like that. Uh? Unless you're some kind of performance artist whose medium is a desk, papers, and computer, you should learn to focus your creativity in your work or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. I've seen the studios of famous artists who paint crazy, disorganized, abstract paintings.. they are often neat and clean and all the tools, like brushes and paints, are in a row, ready to use. These people have learned to focus their energy on their work, and not trying to find the Cadmium Yellow in that pile on the floor.
Another thing about being disorganized: it keeps you from scaling. Limits the number of projects you can do or the hobbies you can keep track of. What a drag.
Personally I recommend the Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It routine (found in Getting Things Done and other books). Just practice it for a month and see if doesn't make your life a little bit smoother to see that empty inbox.
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
Even this article gives the impression that a messy inbox is just a "lifestyle choice", or something your parents taught you. Forget it. An organized inbox, desk, computer, etc., will almost always win over a sloppy one. So stop blaming your genes or your parents or the clock and GET ORGANIZED. Especially if you work with me.
Amusing article, I'm a hoarder myself and my desk and work areas are always one step away from being declared hazardous zones.
Thing is, I don't see the difference between storing your emails in sep folders vs in your inbox, either way you've saved the email (i.e. you didn't delete it). Sure, it _may_ be faster to retrieve if it's sorted, but the time saved is often not all that huge. Plus, I'm constantly referring back to previous emails, it would be very counter productive to have to, irony here, fire off an email to someone to remind me of some key piece of information (assuming I can even remember who to ask).
Sure, there is a lot of background clutter that occurs, and I could delete those, but they are generally not in my way. The big thing I see is simple performance, if a large inbox causes things like searches and or simply basic operations to take too long, then it's time to prune.
The size of your inbox says a lot more about the tools you use to manage your mail.
I think the main thing a large inbox tells about a user is that he uses tools capable of working easily against a large inbox.
With reasonable tools (imap if you keep them on the server, and good search indexes on the client) 50,000 emails isn't unmanageable. With tools that suck (pop if you keep them on the server) an inbox of 100 gets ugly.
I have almost(*) all the email I've ever received since 1986 or so; organized in two mail-folders per year (one for spam). It's quite a few (well, many) gig of email; but interesting nonetheless. It's also quite useful when answering the "didn't you get my email" type questions.
But the primary reason I don't delete them is "why should I - my email client already marks them as 'read', and once it did that, the email is out of the way and no longer bothers me unless I actively search for it".
(*) company data retention policies made me delete some work related emails.
I never have unanswered emails (usually I receive between 50 and 80 daily). I take care all of them. I keep the stuff I need to act upon further on my main Inbox, and I move everything that's already been replied on my Archive-Inbox folder. I delete all spam emails on the spot, I archive all legitimate. My main inbox folder (that I need to further act upon) usually doesn't have more than 3-10 emails.
I'm keeping all of my SPAM as evidence for the day when I can sue all those motherfuckers.
A little advice, in work environment, keep every email and every reply so no one can fuck you over.
Linux O Muerte!
My e-mail box is full of old e-mails because there's no reason to delete them?
At work I keep almost every e-mail I get. I want them all to stay long enough to get backed up (policy is actually that we MUST do that, though it's not enforced) however I've plenty of space, there's no need to delete them. That way, should there be a question about something some months later, I can look it up in the old mail. Once a year or so I trash everything over 6 months old, if it was important I'd have already filed it away in an important folder.
My inbox habits aren't really related to how I do things in my personal life, just to what the technology allows me to do. It's not like I leave the mails waiting because I haven't responded, I just leave them because there's no compelling reason to delete them regularly, and several to not do so.
Thunderbird automatically moves all my emails into the appropriate nested folders automatically. Once an email has been read and dealt with, it is marked read. If there are tasks I have to do based on the email, it is left as 'unread' till I'm done. I have over 25k emails over last 8 years and right now only one message shows as 'unread'
I've never had an email clutter issue. Searching through emails is easy too. My sent mail is organized in nested folders too. Now if only Thunderbird could apply rules to my sent emails automatically.
I never thought I was in the minority, but the more I see how others work, the more I think that I might very well be.
My In box is used exclusively for immediate, pressing emails. They are almost all from the last week, and are generally emails that I have not responded to, but need to. Sometimes I keep an email in there that I have responded to, but that just means that I *need* a response, and that I should email the person again if I do not hear back.
If my In box ever gets more than about 10-12 messages in it, I make a concerted effort to go through and clean it out.
That said, I have well over 60,000 messages (no junk/spam, that gets deleted) saved on my computer. They are saved in about 120 different mailboxes (as Eudora calls them), using about 20 or so different folders and subfolders.
As soon as an email is no longer needed in my In box, it gets filed away in another mailbox.
The idea of keeping everything in one giant mailbox is completely strange to me.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
If it was important, another "have you forget" email will follow...
I used to file or delete everything. I was proud of the low numbers in my inbox as it showed I was on top of it. Now, I've got over 1 TB of storage, and a fast processor. I still file some categories of email out of habit, and every once and a while I throw other categories away. My inbox has over 8,200 emails in it. At any time I can search them by name, date, subject, keyword, even multiple fields. I guess the bust thing about computers is that even if you don't have a meticulous filing system, you can index search and organize things anyway. Works for me anyhow.
San Francisco Photographers
According to me, the whole thing is nonsense.
Dont delete them. Archive them, and 5 years from now go back and see if you remember what was going on those days. I have gone back a read some old email and some of them made me smile. Funny how everything changes including oneself. This is the closest you can get to a diary, whitout writing one.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
I'm sorry, but this has really incensed me! This is absolute crap, I am incredibly organised when it comes to email because it's easy to stay on-top off (well, at least try to.) If an email is important, or it contains information that I will definatly need in the future, I will file it in a subfolder. If it's related to ongoing work, I will keep it in my intray until said work is completed when it will then be deleted. If it's my mother sending me pictures of kitten it will hit the trash before I've even gotten to the end. I wish my life was this organised, but it's just not - my bedroom is always a mess of clothes (until I start running out) and God knows that this place could do with a spring clean! Organising one's "virtual" presence is a hell of a lot easier than physically sorting things out! That felt good :)
I think you have to take into consideration your personal email and your work email and how well the search function works. For example, my work email is neat and tidy. This is due to the lovely 60 day auto delete rule. Sure, I have a a personal folder, but I'd rather pull off my toenails than use the search function in Outlook. On the otherhand, I keep every last email (unless it's p0rn spam) in my gmail. If I need to find out something, I type in a few key words and presto chango I have mac and cheese.
It's pretty obvious that who you are affects what you do in life: Be it work, or your inbox, it's nothing surprising, really. Where Mr. Greenfield's theory falls apart is when you consider the work that needs to be done to clean the inbox versus the work that needs to be done in everyday life. For example, my inbox is sorted and cleaned each time an email comes in, but yet, my house is quite messy and I have a lot of outstanding items on my agenda. Mr. Greenfield says "inboxes are metaphors for our lives", I am a living proof that the claim is not true.
At work I maintain folders for each project, and seperate folders for general, personal, hr etc. As soon as I get mail it goes to the appropriate folder. When a project is done, the entire folder moves to the completed projects folder. Every time I reply to an email, I cc myself so I can put my own emails in the folder also.
With gmail, which I use for my personal mail, this isn't necessary. Conversations are grouped together (no need to cc myself). Folders are irrelevent with the vastly superior google search (ever tried to search an outlook inbox? takes minutes... somehow google does the same thing in seconds, with greater accuracy). google does let you have folders if you want - they just call them labels. labels are more powerful than folders because a single message can simultaneously be in many different labels.
if the technology exhisted to 'sort' the stuff around your house automatically
(or by just poting at something and telling it where to go), then he would be correct.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can't believe this topic just came up.
:)
I've JUST spent the past three weeks emptying out my Inbox. I had over 1000 messages, going back to 2002, and all messages I felt deserved some kind of answer. (I run a rather busy website, and folk are mailing me for help or complaints all the time).
Unfortuantely, if I let an email sit for a while - like, its a difficult problem to deal with - it'll get buried in other mail, and before I know it, I have a hundred messages, then 200, then 500, and you can guess the rest.
Well, I have ZERO now. They're all handled. Okay, I cheated on some and turned a handful of messages into a "todo" item, but in every case the people sending me mail know what I've done... now.
Zero messages! Woo! I wonder how long this will last
I leave my email in the inbox for as long as I need to deal with it. Once I finish, I delete it and it goes into the trash.
:)
The thing is that I never empty the trash - I still have emails as far back as 2001 in there
Ever since discovering Inbox Zero, I am a happier man.
For me, this means:
That way I don't have to wonder, "Say, I think there was some email I was meaning to deal with, where was it, somewhere in here, was it last week? And it's such a joy to have a perfectly empty It really is a great methodology / philosophy, and I heartily recommend it.
Of course, I'd have more cred as a gettting-things-done wizard if I weren't reading Slashdot at the moment...
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
I like GMail's rules, and obey them in my office:
* Search, don't sort
* Don't throw anything away
No so keen on
* Keep it all in context
There are few things I would not do to have Google, Spotlight, or even grep for my office!
Looks like Jeffrey Zaslow is still living in the internet of ten years ago.
I can't begin to describe how useful it is to keep a comprehensive email history. With a good system of labelling, archiving and searching, anything can be retrieved in a matter of seconds. Every day I query my mail archives: to find old contacts; to recall what was said in a conversation a year ago; to re-read old minutes. I have even taken to emailing memos and reminders to myself so that they can be searched in the same process with my communications.
does a neat and tidy inbox also mean a neat and tidy desk and / or work environment? That is, can this be generalised to a person's the work persona? And I mean, "work persona" not the the person in general - I'm pretty neat at work but my home is a mess!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
Have you ever seen people who "save" email in their deleted items folder?
I was astounded when I first observed it. I seen it several times now. No joke.
Who will guard the guards?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...that whether your inbox is cluttered or clean, you need professional psychiatric help, according to psychiatrists!
Just kidding. Actually, there are no professional psychiatrists quoted in the article at all -- just "consultants" of various sorts.
The only time I read any of my e-mail is when I use registration forms on websites and it requires it. IM works fine for every other use.
Another obvious article on Slashdot? Every physical and mental task you do tells about yourself in the way you do it. This is no different from the way somebody eats a pizza, or how you choose to put pepperoni on your pizza.
I have various flavours of archived inboxes and mboxes, stretching back to rather disorganized BSD PDP-11 in 1987.
Don't delete anything. You'd be surprised at what becomes valuable or worthy of a chuckle 20 years later. Or archeology given long enough.
See also: midden.
Da Blog
In a completely different topic, I absolutely abhor the way Lotus Notes manages conversation threads. Its confusing. Or did I become used to the Google/Web way of doing stuff?
jlx
I remember the last time I deleted an email... lets see the taskbar on my machine was grey and uninspired, it was a 25mb ISP POP3 account, I was in Mozilla Mail, and I had just gotten this email saying "... has invited you to Gmail!"
Piss off. I'm not doing what you tell me to, and submitting you your repressive inbox-ocracy. I refuse to even consider the idea that an inbox exists.
... and then they built the supercollider.
i've never deleted an email, ever. though i'd be totally screwed if someone had access to my mail box, all those password reminders after i have a sudden spout of "whats the most crazy password i can thing of"
My work has a system where any emails in the inbox more than six months old are automatically deleted. So if you really want to keep something, you archive it promptly to ensure it doesn't disappear. Or, judging from the behaviour of some colleagues, you mourn the loss in dramatic terms, stamping up and down the hallways, muttering imprecations against the IT department.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
I bet the next week or two will show a major drop in office worker productivity, as this article inspires a significant number of people to drop everthing else and clean out their inboxes.
B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The university I work for has a mail server and we are all "encouraged" to use this for our mail.
OK, but the mailbox there has a 100Mb limit and if I keep any amount of the mail on the server (which I assume is backed up - an added plus) I run into the limit quickly (it doesn't take many ".doc" files and that is the format that everyone uses). Which then means I need to spend quite a bit of time moving things around. I'd download them (actually, I do download them, but using IMAP so a copy stays on the server), but I use several different computers from several locations, so I really like the convenience of having it all accessible.
Add in the fact that mail spam processing takes several hours (from time of sending a message till it gets into my mailbox). And if I turn on spam processing half my students email gets tagged as spam. But if i turn off spam processing I get enough spam to fill up my mailbox even faster.
And that they can't even keep the thing running.
So I use google mail and it just works. If only I could talk the university into using the google mail hosted service.
I feel like replying to that 4 year old email........
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Eh, I'm not convinced my inbox represents me. I'm very messy and certainly nobody has ever accused me of being organized, but just setting up a few simple rules keeps me from having more than a few emails in my inbox at any given time.
Get yourself a good IMAP provider (try www.fastmail.fm), set up spam filering and some Seive filtering on the server side and you'll never see clutter again. Mailing lists go into their folders, family stuff goes into a family folder, and clients go to their own place. Setting aside time each week to do that would mean it was never done for most people. The only thing I ever do manually is drag old messages to an "archive" folder once they're too old to worry about.
You can use any email client you like this way (Mail.app does insanely fast text searching thanks to spotlight), or just check from your phone or web browser and not have to download lots of junk. All other mail solutions (gmail, etc) seem positivly archaic because they require you to *do* stuff on a regular basis, or they lock you into a particular interface, or are impossible to backup.
If I could just write a seive filter to auto-reply to all my messages in an intelligent manner, I could finally go back to playing video games all the time!
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I have every personal e-mail message I've ever sent or received since 1994 sitting in my mail spool on a VPN-accessible IMAP server in my apartment. About 60,000 messages (perhaps 5GB, all told) in my "inbox". No folders. No sorting. No deleting. I can find any message I want using the search capabilities of my mail client (thunderbird or pine or elm, depending) and I can't say I've ever lost track of a discussion.
Now I understand that people have quotas on their mail spool and the like, what what the hell is up with wanting to remove messages from their inbox? And why bother trying to sort messages in to folders? Is it too hard to remember keywords from any particular exchange in a message?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
As an ad coordinator (read: middleman) at a publishing company, my entire job is email. I'm an insanely disorganized and slobbish person in real life, but in my work life I have to be organized or I wouldn't be able to function. I have specific folders for everything and my inbox is always empty. When someone asks me about something that's happened months ago, I always know exactly where to find what I need.
As I sit here at home, though, fearing to go to my gmail inbox as it's a mess, looking around me at the dirty clothes, empty cans (well, most of them are empty), and overflowing garbage, I'm forced to wish I could organize myself that well at home.
Oh well, I just blame my parents for raising me this way.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
What TFA doesn't mention and no one else here seems to have brought up is that the number you get every day matters. It's obviously much easier to stay on top of 20 daily emails than it is 200. Once the pile gets too big, you simply think that it's too hard to manage, and give up.
I get about 20 emails a day, which means about 3 per hour. Of those, half are informative messages sent to me from one of my servers (which can be read and then deleted). So I only have to manage/respond to one email per hour. That's not a problem at all.
OTOH, if I had to respond to ten email an hour they would probably pile up faster than I could handle and would soon stop responding all together (and that's exactly what the faculty around here seem to do, unless the From header is someone they know)
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I give every organization its own email address (I realize this isn't unique, but I'm surprised at how few people do it). If the address gets out and I start getting spam, it's a simple matter to redirect that mail to /dev/null. A fortunate consequence of this method is another, easier way of filtering incoming messages: by the "To:" field, rather than hacking together "From:" or "Subject:" entries as needed. So far, I've had no need for any spam filtering solution. I get the most spam from the address listed in my WHOIS records and on my website, but I could start rotating that address if I really cared.
Not to say I'm organized enough to have every filter set up. Still, I usually don't let more than a couple hundred messages build up before I clear them out.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
What's with the Northwest Florida Daily News links to what are really just AP stories? This makes 2 in as many days...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
and growing!
I just don't get it... I go through around a hundred or so emails a day between work and personal inboxes... and I can't say it's ever had anything near the kind of impact the people in the article descibed... anxiety because of a full inbox? paralizing fear because of the number of unread messages? I have to wonder how insignificant and tiny one's life must be that a series of text messages could cause anxiety and fear... It's just email, why give it that much thought?
;)
That being said, one should always write thoughtful emails
Yes, I do exactly the same thing! My external HD is just loaded up with stupid little "funny" movie clips off the net, you know all those lame video clips on joke sites your friends send you, or in my case a lot of music/gear-related videos etc., along with mp3s and music videos I don't even like much anymore (but I "might want to see at some later time")...
... old files from 3 years ago that I only downloaded "temporarily" yet are still there, taking up space...
Sometimes I go through my disk to free up space and I find files and wonder "Why the hell is this still on here?"
anyone remember bloomba? I don't know whether it came before or after gmail, but it's basically an offline version of gmail useful for consolidating and searching every email I've sent or recieved (minus spam) from pine, eudora, foxmail, outlook etc. I looked at the patterns of my sending and receiving mail over the years and what I see is that I used to send and receive fewer, longer emails. Now it's shorter, frequent messages.
Having developed a sophisticated way of organizing mail, as I'm sure many of you have too, it was hard to move to gmail. But structured searches are the only way to cope with the new volume of messages. Whether bloomba (please come back, bloomba!) or gmail, it's the future. Unless we want to end up stuck in our ways, and explaining to our kids when their world comes how things used to be better and why we don't understand their newfangled technology.
Work-related mail is retained forever as a CYA; I file them into per-client folders once the issue is closed, or I create a formal task entry for the issue, or they're superseded by a more recent mail. Gmail is retained forever because it's free; 99% of it is mailing lists (pure discussion) which are auto-filtered. ISP mail is deleted because it's not free (I only have a 40 GB home server); a fair chunk of it is mailing lists (where I may need to do stuff in response) which are auto-filtered.
My wife has this weird thing about creating category folders, and then sub-folders for the individual people she talks to, with an auto-filter for each sub-folder. Migrating that monstrosity from OE to Thunderbird was Not Fun (tm).
Quotes from the "psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn." are the basis for this?
1) ROFL PSYCHOLOGIST
2) ROFL CENTER FOR INTERNET BEHAVIOR
3) ROFL CONNECTICUT
My god, the Northwest Florida Daily News needs to get better feature writers and feature ideas.
Right now, my email client says I have 2667 messages in my in-box. The oldest message I have dates back to January 31st, 2006. While most of these emails aren't very important, and it certainly wouldn't do much harm in deleting them, it seems to me like there isn't any reason to delete email that is less than a year or two old. My .evolution folder is only taking up 122.3MB out of the 1TB in the machine, so it's certainly mot a matter of running out of storage space. Organization is accomplished with Search Folders in Evolution, and if I need to find anything searching is fairly snappy. Given that there aren't really any down sides, I don't see any reason to not keep email around for a year or two, just in case. It's not like storing actual letters where they could pile up and take up real physical storage space, be difficult to search through, etc.
Especially when so much business correspondance takes place via email, isn't it better to be safe and keep things around "just in case" than sorry if you happen to need them?
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
IT would be as unthinkable as geting rid of books.
Admittidly, my goal is to have all the information that has ever existed and I wish painful death on anyone and any group that would prevent that. As a member of homo sapiens all the information that has ever existed or will exist is my birthright (except for the private information of others, if they wish to be paranoid; I prefer the slow public death of those who abuse rather than preventing access to, information). Outside of spam I archive nearly everything, going back to documenataion from a COBOL program in the mid '70's. Until I can have a jack put into my brain that dumps multiple OC-225 streams straight from all existing backbones directly into my brain I'll have to settle for maxing out my library, my Amazon credit card and multiple email accounts.
Data, like sex, firepower, horsepower and tube wattage, is inherently GOOD!!!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Although I think the conclusion of the assertion may have a ring of truth to it, I believe that it sweeps too wide a brush. You can, in fact, take any sort of organizational activity and start to make the very same generalizations about an individuals behaviors and correlate them to their upbringing, how their parents raised them, etc.. For example, if I look at the way my office is arranged, or perhaps how the interior of my car is: can i deduce anything if it is neat and tidy, or instead in a disarray?
The truth is my e-mail inbox used to be spic-and-span, organized, archived and tucked away. I used to work in IT and once upon a time, if your Microsoft Outlook hit the 2gb mark your entire e-mail data file would turn corrupted and be destroyed forever. Yet, with the advent of g-mail and mega storage capacities available freely, I haven't deleted a letter since. As my boss once told me, it pays to 'cover your ass.' Does this prove that my former characteristic cleanliness has drifted away into slovenly disregard? No, it merely says in this case that I can afford the space to leave all of my e-mail. I think that trying to read the analyze the character of another human's psyche is missing out on more reliable factors.
My Inbox is filled with Viagra.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
As some others have mentioned, you have to keep your work email one day longer than your boss and your co-workers. Maybe not in the email program, but definitely archived somewhere. Everything else is just suicidal. All my private email is Gmail, and I am currently using 159MB out of whatever they offer right now. I do delete everything that ends up in the spam filter once a month or so, though.
I do clean out my inbox by the end of every day, though. The emails either get answered and moved to a per month or per project folder, or go into a todo folder. I used to be a lot more anal, but desktop search engines make it pretty much irrelevant where I filed the email. When I switch jobs, all my email go on a couple of DVDs if allowed by my former employer. I still get occasional questions even from the university department I left 10 years ago.
I archive everything that I probably can't get in a store in a few years. Why have Season 1 of the X-Files taking up space when Best Buy is already archiving it for me? The best things to archive are the old cartoons that aren't politically correct anymore, funny or propaganda commercials (anti-drug), and live events like news. The best is NFL football so you don't have to watch the edit job done by NFL Films later on.
> But I find search to be a little disappointing in Gmail,
/combiner
...
What are you missing? There are lots of nice search operators for mail. It's better than the search on any other mail client I've used, at least.
> there is no spell checker , no suggested words, no word splitter
Err, there *IS* a spell checker, and it does suggest words--when you're composing an email, it's on the right hand side, just above the input box for the body of the email. Do you have JavaScript off or something? You are using the fancy web 2.0-y version, right? I have no idea what the splitter/combiner is, unless you mean that it suggests the correct "a lot" every time you type the non-word "alot" or something
Shudder. How can someone use the "Delete" word with such abandon? Sure, eliminate the oldest 9,000 messages by archiving them to CD with a copy of Mutt. But delete? Never!
My motto, "Email becomes inoperative when the media becomes unreadable." Which, I've come to accept probably applies to my Commodore floppies from the 80s.
Mmkay, I have anywhere from 500-700 emails sitting in my inbox by the time I go 'yup, needs cleaning'.
I re-route four main 'form' emails to a local frat's folder, ff.net, LiveJournal, and Slashdot (natch). I either find these important enough to take note of, or 'just' distinguishable enough that I jump upon seeing them.
Likewise, I have over 150 messages in my inbox from my ex, who I could shunt into a folder as well, but I figured out that I'd just rather delete the lot of them after a while, but because most of the messages are filled with piss and vitriol, I don't want to be reminded of them in such an obvious manner.
The remainder are school-related (because hey, you should hold onto those like you would old graded tests), and they'll be dropped into a folder to clean out the year once school starts up again, leaving me with a blank inbox.
So... I likely hang onto the past too much, have a hard time remembering things, show a keen interest in knowing when people actually notice me online, and have one fucked up relationship history. Yeah, that about covers it.
I stopped deleting messages from my email boxes long after I stopped sorting out into which folders I download files. These hierarchical DBs are useless for nearly everything but long transaction lists. When I want to find something, I use a search function. When I want to associate different items, I create links. I rarely know what I'll need to find, or how it relates to what else I'll have stored, when I first receive or create it. All those relationships are virtual, views and links - ways of using the data that's not directly related to where I store it.
--
make install -not war
Kind of true: I'm a pack rat. No doubt.
;)
All my email from 1994 - 2001 or so are tgz-ed. Emails that were on Netzero, my ISPs and on the yahoo hotmail etc (back when they were like 1-2 mb) are all saved and zipped and on my hard drive. Nowadays, with the large limits on yahoo etc, those are all are kept on the servers. They are sorted by how well I know them (family, good friends, acquaintances, new people), economic (bills, charges, itineraries, etc), useful listmail, and 'crap'.
My apartment on the other hand is a complete mess. Maybe if sorting real objects vs. email were easier, my place would be sorted.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Anyone who spends any significant time organizing emails, or has a routine to do so is an ignoramus. No, I'm not trolling - it's a simple fact that most mail clients can be configured to do these routine chores for you. If you don't know how to use them, you're the lazy one. Don't berate the guy with 517 emails in his inbox for being disorganized when he can organize them all in about 30 seconds using his mail client. Why should he spend time doing something the computer can do faster?
If anything, a tidy inbox says that a person is inefficient. The most efficient of us don't spend any effort organizing our mail.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I use gMail. My inbox tells me that at this precise moment I have 1899 emails.
:P
I just let them sit there. According to the usage statistics at the bottom of the page, I am using 172 MB (6%) of my 2753 MB. Most of those 172 MB are those emails you receive with videos/images/whatevers and an infindable Cc: list.
Of course, it turns out that most of my email doesn't come from people. If you scan my inbox, you'll find a series of newsletters, Slashdot updates, mailing list digests, Google Alerts for "Wikipedia", forum registration emails and Word of the Day messages. So I use it mostly for what web application designers figured it was good for.
Like a few other gMail users, apparently, my spam influx started increasing a few months ago. I usually deleted them each day - so it'd never go above 12 or so messages. Lately though, I've given up on deleting them just to see how many I can accumulate. I'm up to 588 so far...
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Keeping your inbox empty (and generally being organized) is a skill that some people have naturally, and others don't. Those that don't, can learn it quite easily.
:-)
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
And for some reason these people say that being disorganized is being "creative" or something like that. Uh? Unless you're some kind of performance artist whose medium is a desk, papers, and computer, you should learn to focus your creativity in your work or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. I've seen the studios of famous artists who paint crazy, disorganized, abstract paintings.. they are often neat and clean and all the tools, like brushes and paints, are in a row, ready to use. These people have learned to focus their energy on their work, and not trying to find the Cadmium Yellow in that pile on the floor.
Another thing about being disorganized: it keeps you from scaling. Limits the number of projects you can do or the hobbies you can keep track of. What a drag.
Personally I recommend the Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It routine (found in Getting Things Done and other books). Just practice it for a month and see if doesn't make your life a little bit smoother to see that empty inbox.
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
Even this article gives the impression that a messy inbox is just a "lifestyle choice", or something your parents taught you. Forget it. An organized inbox, desk, computer, etc., will almost always win over a sloppy one. So stop blaming your genes or your parents or the clock and GET ORGANIZED. Especially if you work with me.
What kind of behavior indicates that you're an old person from Korea?
I could eliminate a lot of redundant emails if there was a way to automatically delete earlier versions of back and forth emails. What I mean is if there is a response to a response to a response to an initial email, I have four emails of which only the most recent has unique info - is there a way to automatically check that the content is in the latest one and delete the earlier ones?
Sorry for the wordieness.
I just figured that my email from 1992, just like magazines from 1900, would be worth something to someone someday.
/pointless discussion, and has more to do with Organization habits that archiving habits.
Just because I have a lot of email, doesn't mean I am a pack rat. I can tell you from many experiences that having certain emails come in handy, such as legal conversations, bank conversations, business consulting conversations. But just because you have alot of email, doesn't mean you are unorganized. I would say that a pack rat, is closer to an unorganized person that an organized one.
For example, 14gb of email in my archive. Most are just straight text. A new message comes in, filters catch the category, mark it as read if so desired, and file it under the right folder. Same way that most people do it. Those folders are archived based on month and year, and again archived into a compressed file. So what if it is a large quantity, its the quality that is important.
I used to adminster a number of OS X machines, and I always thought that spending 5 minutes on a user's machine could tell me more about their brain than working with them for years. Email tidyness is just the tip of the iceberg:
It's all a window straight into their soul.
I use my inbox as a spam-trap. I have filters that automatically route anything to a valid email address to a specific folder (depends on the address) and so anything that is remaining in the inbox should be spam that has slipped through the spam filters.
This tends to be 5-10 messages a day (filters low to avoid false positives) and maybe once a month or so I get a real email that remains in the inbox.
I currently have about 50-70,000 emails in my mail client with another 250,000 archived...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
Defer it -- not tonight dear, I have a headache
Delegate it -- go fuck yourself
Delete it -- I'm leaving you
Email programs have tools that allow you to sort based on various criteria so there is often no need at all to move the things - so long as you don't use a braindead email client like Outlook Express that will crash, burn and corrupt your mailbox when it exceeds 2GB.
It makes sense to sort things into shared folders if other people need to access it - but general mail can match several criteria so if often best sorted by the mail client tools. Everything that is easily sorted (eg. by email address of people you communicate with on a specific project) can be dealt with by mail filters anyway - the email client will let you know if there is new stuff in the approriate box anyway.
Reflection of personal inbox / space is a reflection of personality, what else is new? Next thing I know some expert's going to walk into a messy room and say, "Your disorganized room states a lot about your personality."
Am I the only one here who uses mutt?
Mutt + procmail is the only way to go.
every time I try a GUI I'm disapointed its slow, it works the way someone else thinks *I* should.
Reading email remotly is as fast as it is local... GUI email is for suckers.
"think of it as evolution in action"
It is a skill but there are limits. I can not manage to keep my inbox clean anymore. I always tried to do so. I have more than 100 different folders to store the different messages in. However nowadays I receive between 40 and 100 new email each day (99% are work related, we have a good spam filter). Many of them I will move to appropiate folders but some I have to leave in the inbox there I do not know yet where to file them. Last summer my inbox exploded to 800+ emails and grew to 1300 where I am now. and it is very stable around this level (still growing but slowly). On average I collect about 1GB of work emails per year!
Sometimes I spend an afternoon cleaning up the inbox, but then I feel I better can do some work instead of spending time on that....
Why don't I read them? As a sysadmin I get machines to send me notification messages and only the subject matters and just reading the subject doesn't toggle the mail as read. With other things it can be very handy to subscribe to mailing lists and search the emails for paticular topics when it becomes relevant.
I'm suprised at some of the things expressed in the article, but note that the psychologist is actually quite careful in his proclamation:
"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"
Of course, it still remains somewhat sensationalist. But did we expect less?
According to Thunderbird, I have 30750 emails, going back to the end of March 2000. About 5000 of them are in Junk or Spam folders. Looking back, I even have a folder full of email viruses I received from 2002-2004. I never did anything with them. I just created a folder called "Viruses" and started moving them there.
When I install a new Linux distro at home, I back up my home directory to two other systems, even though 80-90% of what's in there is just backups from previous installs/migrations.
I have a folder on my work desktop (XP) called "old", which contains something like 70000 files consuming 10gb. Every once in a while I back it up to a server. My "My Documents" points to a private share on a samba file server with a mirrored raid, which is backed up nightly to two other servers.
I can recover files deleted from our servers years ago if I wanted. Our ERP database makes its way onto 3 servers, my desktop, and a tape with each nightly backup, and I wrote a script to compare each snapshot and produce a sort of diff-style log of exactly what's changed in each table. I have another script which maintains a full backup of our Exchange server using mbsync, storing one text file per email, because I don't trust Exchange whatsoever, especially with the standard edition's "single proprietary Access-like data file for the entire company's email" limitation.
I've seen plenty of people who delete stuff the moment they decide to move on to something else, and empty their recycle bin or email trash folder immediately after. It bugs the hell out of me. I'm occasionally asked to recover something they've "lost".
It get's copied off the main server to my local HD, using the same folder-tree, once every month. .RAR'd into a nice little file called "Email Archive - YYYY.MM.Q.rar". .RAR files to a CD-RW as soon as there are enough to fill a disc.
Then the local copy gets
I have been doing this since the early 1990's when the idea occured to me (probably after a serious bought of spam).
I archive the
Boss wants to know what we've done in 2001 with $Customer?
Grab the disc, pull the appropriate file, search for that $Customer, and forward the boss everything.
Server crashed? Yeah, so? I'VE got back-up's of every email that's crossed my desk.
(Well, everything but the spam - THAT gets killed off daily after making sure there's no false-positives.)
Saved my ass WAAAAY too many times to count, and I'm DAMNED glad I do it. =)
- Select All
- Mark as Read
Kaetemi
There's really no reason to delete old email. I get rid of junk in my home because it distracts me, makes it harder to keep track of the good stuff and keep it safe, takes too much space, and gets in the way. Old email doesn't have to do any of that. I use a combination of folders, labelling, and automatic message filters to organize my mail. When I'm not interested in it, it's not in my way, and when I want to, I can go back however far I please and look up even the most obscure details of old communications with just a couple of keystrokes. It has the best results all around, and that's what counts.
What's with this obsessive _deleting_? To sort through and delete stuff is extra work.
.isos I have lying around somewhere, or delete a less important virtual machine.
;).
If you run out of space how much space would you recover from deleting emails? Doh. Already most people don't even appear to hit the 2GB mark of gmail (I doubt they'd even bother limiting users to 2GB).
2GB not enough? A 250GB hard drive is USD70 where I live. I wonder how long it would take people to read/scan through 250GB of email. I read pretty fast, but I doubt I'd ever get 250GB of email that would be worth reading.
Instead of deleting stuff that has a higher irreproducibility like email, people should just go delete some of those movies or mp3s they appear to download in vast amounts- especially the widespread ones - they can always find a copy of those again. Those take up a lot more space. In my case I'd do a search and destroy on some knoppix.iso or other
So why bother spending time going through emails and deleting them? Deleting stuff before you run out of space is like shrinking caches before you run out of space. Extra work for little gain.
If it takes too long to search through your emails, or your email client can't cope with more than 65535 emails (or worse 32767) or more than 2GB of emails then your email client is crap.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand throwing away stuff in your room/house that takes up too much physical space or clutters too much. In the physical world you need space to move about in your room/house.
But this is like sifting through a pile of mail in box looking for letters to throw away, when it's all in a fair sized room which can easily fit 100-200 of those boxes. And you already have 50 or more boxes filled with easily reproducible junk. Dumb eh?
Of course if it gives you great satisfaction to delete certain emails go right ahead!
But I don't even waste much time deleting obvious spam - most of it automatically gets moved somewhere else (there's always a chance of a false positive, so from time to time I go take a glance at the past month's spam or something - subject lines often good enough).
What my inbox says about me? I'm lazy I guess
I used to work for a company where the "admin" had an inbox (Outlook Express) that had every mail she had ever received still in it, dating back around 3 years. Fine, not my problem - until she got a virus and I had to scan the whole damn thing. 6 f*ckin hours to scan it ! Productivity - NOT.
Personally, I have all my email accounts as IMAP on my server and deal with all incoming mail as soon as I can. I delete the crap, and read then move to a relevant folder all the rest. Once a month or so, I use Outlook Express on my laptop to download all the stored mail and clear out the IMAP folders. I use message rules in OE to sort the incoming mail into the relevant folders as it comes in, so I don't even have to look at it ( I have already read this mail remember - I just use Ctrl + A and Ctrl + Q to mark all the messages as read in each folder). This is so that I have a local mobile copy of everything in case of a fire or other disaster that I can just grab on my way out the door. Also comes in handy when travelling.
I have moved the outlook express dbx storage folder to a separate partition on the laptop disk, so that if/when I require a re-install of xp I can just point OE to that folder and recover all my mail. Also, once every so often I run DbxConv on the dbx files and convert them to mbox format, then archive them to a cd/dvd for backup. I currently have around 10,000 messages on the laptop organised by subject ( Servers / Domains / Bike / various LUGs / mailing lists / UT2K3 / various website traffic / personal stuff / etc etc) dating back to 2001 (when I bought this particular laptop) which takes up around 250 MB.
My inboxes however, in both OE and on the IMAP servers are completely empty. Yes I do have gmail, but given the nature of the beast, I don't use it for any messages of consequence, and label then archive any mail I do get, so the inbox is still empty.
Is it so hard to stay on top of things that people invent new software just to filter mail because they are too lazy to do it themselves ? And don't give me the Time excuse. If you start with an empty inbox, the time required to keep it that way is minimal.Even a Monkey can sing on American Idol. Whether you get selected after that or recieve a scathing dress-down is a different matter.
D C can go and sing if he wants, but i would love to see him dressed down by the "dude", after which i assume D C will want to take a shotgun....
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
My first thought was that your email habits follow your real-world habits. I think that everyone would do well to learn at least a little bit about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Ind icator/ and what it says about the personality traits of you and those around you.
One catch phrase I recall is that MBTI Ps make files, Fs make piles. My wifeis an ESFJ and very organized, for which I'm thankful every day. I'm an INTP, and I havepiles of books, magazines, mail, whatever all over the place.
The organization force is very weak in me, and periodically I have to sit down and reorganize my (life, mailbox, pilot/airplane logbooks, ?). I try to stay organized, but I've never been able to do it for an extended time. I'm trying, though.
Ecce potestas casei!
I would no sooner clean out my inbox than I would throw out all the documents in my filing cabinet.
Didn't you realize that? Horders, clutterfreaks, the chronically disorganized are secretly in love with the power it gives them. It's a kind of narcissism.
a) they are the ONLY one who can find something because to everyone else it looks like a trash heap
b) they love the drama because everything has to go through them first
c) they get to make you stand there and watch them fumble through the clutter while they pretend to be doing you a favor
d) and if they can't find it, they just lash out at you for pressuring them
Gee whiz everyone knows that.
Never delete and never respond.
Is that bad?
And then one day your sick and the next guy needs to figure out your unsorted system? I assume that as a sysadmin you could set up simple rules for handling messages that are not relevant....
I use Mail.app as well. I dislike having to use a browser to access my mail, otherwise I'd be fine with Gmail's obviously slick interface. Thing is, Mail wont be updated 'til Leopard comes out - except for security patches - and I'm getting fed up with it. No spam blocker, sluggish performance, and it has some weird bugs where it can't keep track of which messages I've read and the like. I've downloaded Thunderbird, as it seems to be the other popular Mac mail client, and I've downloaded Eudora for old time's sake - but I've been reluctant to actually make the switch without some better opinions than "Rated 5 out of 5 by anonymous people who probably wrote the software!"
Thoughts?
I've been using Opera for my mail for years, and I nearly dumped it at one stage when they switched to 'M2' for mail - it didn't support folders!!!
But inertia took over and, after a while, I've come to love it. If I want something folder-like, I create a filter. If I want to find something specific, I do a search. Everything is indexed so searches are lightning fast, Opera's available for most platforms I'd ever consider using, and if I needed to move to another app I can import the mail fairly easily.
And I don't have to bother thinking about the (unlikely) possibility that Google could be doing anything I don't like with my mail.
Gmail has charged from the first moment they were born. They charge the advertiser. They are selling you to them. They are paying you with email services.
They get to know you better by scanning your email, and can then deliver targeted audience to the advertisers.
It is very up front, clearly stated and obvious.
If that is not enough pay, don't take the deal. Go setup an IMAP server and keep all your magic mojo to yourself. That'll show 'em.
You are letting the clutter grow while hopping for the best.
An addres of any importnace should be in an address book, a phone number in a contacts list, important messages should be archived in a way that are easy to find and contextualize (by project, date, etc).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My approach to email is based on two 'facts'.
:) In outlook this essentially means moving it into a personal folder (my company has a 100MB limit on server based inboxes). I have a series of dated folders for each of my archive points. This is perfectly adequate as, generally, the value of emails diminishes over time; archived emails are slightly less accessible but I am even less likely to need them so the effort level on average remains low.
1. Computers are better at searching than me.
2. Computer storage (on the scale of email at least) is cheap.
Thus I keep everything (except obvious junk and spam) in one big folder called 'Archive'. My Inbox is virtually empty except for stuff that I haven't read yet. If I need older stuff then I run a search on my Archive - I use google desktop (I expect people have heard of them).
This way I don't waste time trying to think of which folder an email should go into. Why waste the time organising email that I will almost certainly never re-read - I estimated that I only reread less than 5% of the mail even once. If only I could have all that time back I spent deciding in which of the 98 folders an email belonged. I don't think I ever had single email that didn't belong in at least 3!
When 'Archive' gets too big I archive it
When I go through my new mail anything that needs more than 2 minutes thought goes temporarily into 'Action'. Everything else is read and dumped into 'Archive'. When I'm ready I'll go through the stuff in 'Actions' and do what is needed then dump the mail into 'Archive'.
The real joy of this is that my inbox is just that, an inbox and not a cluttered mess - I bet at home you at least pick up the mail from the floor and put it on your kitchen table. I would really urge people to try this as I found the experience very liberating. It would take me two days to clear my inbox after a 2 week holiday, last time I did it in 15 minutes; inbox empty. (ok I had plenty of to do in actions but my inbox was ready to work as an inbox again and I had a sense of the work outstanding)
Most of this I got from reading the classic "Getting things done" book by Dave Allen. I'm not 100% sold on GTD but bits really do work for me.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Once a month?
Once a year?
Almost never? (most likely).
Memories are overrated.
Most people chose a few pictures here and there, frame them and forget about all the other hundreds that are not important.
Ditto with email.
Quantity does not make up for quality.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
TFA is baseless supposition, almost certainly intended as PR for the supposed expert.
People interact with their computers in the way that they're taught, either explicitly by another person or instructions, or implicitly through learning the functions and their built in descriptions (or lack thereof). Oh, and let's not forget advice, which typcally provides 5 "answers" in 4 posts, followed by arguments trailing off topic further and further.
People interact with other people by evolving behaviors based on the personalities of all involved, the situation(s) they find themselves in, and the social constraints of those environments/relationships.
Or, they act that way for completely unrelated reasons. I keep my inbox cleaned out because I started out using an Apple II, 25 years ago when 140K floppies cost $25 for ten, and I had to be frugal with storage (as well as message length, running at 300 baud). I developed that habit then, and never changed. 80GB at my disposal, and I have 2 messages in my inbox and six saved as reminders to write back later. The difference between the state of my onbox and the state of my desk is astounding.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I have emails dating back to 1995
The only email I delete is spam.
does that make me a pack rat?
does that make obsesive about information?
or am I too lazy to clean up the folders?
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
.... when you have room to store it is nonsense.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This is offtopic but here goes. This article is another example showing that most insights by psychologists in the press are tantamount to readings from a fortune tellers. Hmm... inbox full = life empty. inbox empty = impulsive. Exactly where is the science in such an observation? Was there a survey of inbox habits & psychological profiles? This is just a random, uninsightful observation.
Back on topic... I never delete anything, including all sent items, and I started using x1 about two years ago to instantly find mails, mail attachments, and files. While it is a massive resource hog, it has saved my bacon dozens of times.
... that delivery of email *is not* guaranteed, do you?
The fact that you send it does not mean that the recipient received it.
If you want a verifiable paper trail you need either, er, paper documentation, or a secure means of communication (perhaps PGP signed email).
Your justification is bull and the other party can deny they ever received the emails and you would have no leg to stand on.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I give each organization its own email address, and sometimes I actually create the accounts.
I am not a crackpot.
Or whatever the medium is.
Hoarding movies just because is a waste of time and money.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People have trouble finding and organizing mail because most modern mail clients have exceedingly difficult-to-use search functionality. Gmail is nice, but I don't want to have to keep my mail on some other company's server that I can't control. I have 37,972 messages in my inbox right now, and I've only found one program that can handle it: PINE. With my inbox open, PINE is only using 19 MB of RAM and searches through every message in a couple seconds.
God bless the memory-constrained developers of the 1980s.
--Quentin
Stuff coming in from various mailing lists is placed in dedicated folders and automagically expired based on folder-specific rules. Other items of interest (bill notifications, notes from relatives, news items, etc.) are automatically shuffled to their own folders and kept for a longer period of time (some are set to expire in a year, while others don't expire at all).
The bits that are left I go through by hand, but that folder is only kept around for 30 days. If it's something I want to keep, I save it off somewhere else manually.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
You seem to miss a basic computing issue here - searches in your inbox isn't NP-complete (unless, perhaps if you use Microsoft Outlook). It can be solved in O(n) (which to the casual observer can be close to instantly for this particular problem), or less depending on what kinds of indexing are performed in the background. Furthermore, sorting can be performed at lightning speed according to different criteria.
Consider the time it takes to go to the right folder, and scroll down to the proper message contra slinging some relevant words into a search box and have three candidate emails pop up that you can click on instantly.
To me, this means that imposing order upon your inbox is largely irrelevant as the computer takes care of it faster than you can. Therefore, I'd argue that your proposed unread-messages-only theory is just a waste of time.
That you tie this matter up to being organized in other aspects of one's endeavours seems to indicate more of a compulsive-obsessiveness - one ought choose one's habits one by one from a rational perspective rather than automatically assume that exercising one's intellect will lead to hell.
Though I do agree with your points on being an organized person.
Thank you for your attention.
About three years ago, I started keeping a journal. This was due to two factors: Livejournal was just then becoming very popular, and I work at an ISP. I was starting to wonder if the massive clusterfucks that our telco was regularly handing down to us had any historical reference. Did other infrastructures, which today are nearly infallible, have their growing pains in the first 10 years of their existence? Was the telephone network as flaky in 1906 as the internet is today? Was the power grid? I knew that the automobile was very much a hobbyist's toy at that time, much like the computer was in 1990. Noone today would stand for a car so finicky and in need of constant attention as they were then, yet we still need to defrag our hard drives and scan for viruses on a weekly basis.
I started to record my daily hectic firewalking, so that historians a century from now can say "wow, they sure had a lot of trouble with making the internet work back then! It's so reliable now!" I also keep most of my work e-mail, for the same reason. I expect someday I'll be printing it all out with archival ink and storing it in a safety deposit box, or keeping it perpetually backed up in digital form, or preferrably both.
Historians place great value on the correspondance between people in the past. E-mail is the modern equivalent to the letters between Napoleon and Josephine. We don't think much of it now, but it's a historical record that must not be lost.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It also has a lot to do with your e-mail client.
I find that I behave differently in regard to organization when I use different e-mail programs. For example, my system in Lotus Notes is much less organized than Outlook. I organize Outlook differently than I organize Evolution. I organize Squirel Mail differently than I organize my Yahoo Mail. I'm sure Gmail would be different too if I ever found the need for an account.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
it is a trait of disorganized people.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
ever delete personal email?? Even back when hard disks were much smaller, stored email represented a fraction of a fraction of your available space. The potential that one of those swiftly deleted emails might prove to be important weeks or years after it was recieved is enough to stop me from ever deleting even the most trivial personal email. I've still got emails hanging around from over 12 years ago. I backup all my email constantly, because I consider it content, just as I would consider old family photos or an old diary. The only exceptions I could think of are SPAM and un-necessarily large attachments.
Hello Everybody
E-mail is broken because the very basic principle of how it works allows things like spam.
I stopped using it two years ago.
Apart from that, computery things in general are not as important as dorks (aka "hackers" as designated by people like ESR) like to think (except for archivars perhaps).
Those dorks like to think that computers produce the whole modern world as we know it, or at least see it as a metaphor for it. That's why most dorks love "The Matrix", which is in fact just old-fashioned hollow hollywood kitsch portraying vulgar and oversimplified philosophical ideas of times long gone.
Dorks just hold on to stuff like e-mail because computers usually are the only thing on earth they have, and they usually are the only ones who really know how they work, thus feeling important every time a non-computernerddork talking about or using computers. Nobody cares about it, believe me. Letters still have infinitely more credibility than e-mails.
Or, to put it another way: nobody, including yourself, will _ever_ re-read _any_ of your 12000 non-spam-but-nonetheless-junk-mails, you victims of consumerism. The real value you put in it is _not_ the storage space these mails use up, but the time and thought you need to administer them.
The End Of The World took approx. 2000 years to happen and it's been over since approx. 100 years.
We are just the aftermath; rotting, pathetic flesh.
Greets,
Dombrovsky
Great, you know all about me by looking at my inbox.. Next you're going to tell my my horoscope is personally meaningful also?
The problem is that most email clients don't offer an "archive" button, and people like to keep their inbox clear. This leads to people using their deleted items as an archive. If you have local mail storage and you know what you are doing (and no one else has the priviledge to empty your trash), then why not?
I suspect that you may need to read "Gulliver's Travels" (the bit about eating boiled eggs from the large or small end), and possibly get a life (not necessarily in that order).