Ask HN: Is it healthy to have 20 years of archived emails? - dfee
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jason_slack
I have 23+ years worth of e-mail. Started as Pine back in 1995, moved to
Postmaster (on BeOS) at some point Eudora, Evolution (on Linux), Thunderbird,
GyazMail, Mail.app and now considering moving to Mutt and pop-ing down mail
locally again. Currently takes up about 46gb.

I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my
mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc.

About 4 years ago I had an old employer e-mail me out of the blue asking if I
remembered some code that I wrote. I hadn't worked for them in about 15 years.
I was able to send them all the e-mails I had from the project that spanned 6
months.

~~~
stevekemp
> I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of
> my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc.

That sounds like a fascinating idea. I wrote my own email client, but it uses
Maildirs for storage (with optional IMAP support), and one of the biggest
issues is that reading every file in a large directory is slow.

(Well if I'm honest the issue is reading and parsing every file from a given
maildir hierarchy.)

Caching headers helps some, but if it were all in a database I'm sure it would
significantly simpler. "notmuch" went down that route, and it seems like it
pays off in terms of speed. The issue really is importing the mail, and making
sure your database doesn't get out of sync with the files on-disk.

If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-
import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!

~~~
jason_slack
> If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-
> import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!

Oh, I did! I figured why not? It would just mean that I needed to use my
client for history if I ever stopped developing it and went back to some other
solution. Of course I used a copy of my e-mail while developing and testing,
etc.

------
cblock811
Maybe if you printed them as a "backup". What makes you think having them is
unhealthy?

~~~
dfee
I’m not sure. Something about holding onto baggage of things that are no
longer relevant to me. In the same, or a similar, vein I kinda feel the need
to purge 80% of the photos I’ve taken from the last 25 years.

------
kleer001
If you're asking for permission to clean it all away, you have it. rm -rf that
sucker.

~~~
dfee
I didn’t even ask about my last 20 years of projects - Carbon apps for Mac OS
10.4. Maybe I should just run `rm -rf ~`

~~~
kleer001
Hey, if you haven't used it in the last 10 years you probably never will OR a
more efficient solution has already been found for the frame-work you're using
now.

Unless it's truly a one-of-a-kind genius solution that no one will ever come
up with again...

------
amorphous
I don't see why it should be unhealthy unless you use past memories to escape
the present.

I'm keeping a daily journal since 2005. I started this to document my thought
process and to improve my writing. It's a treasure trove that helps me to
understand myself better and to find out my blind spots. As memories are
fickle I wish I had emails to give me another view of my past.

------
borplk
If you haven't been accessing it and are thinking about deleting maybe
consider starting it off with the older half and wait for a while and see how
it goes.

------
DoreenMichele
If you need to ask a bunch of internet strangers how healthy this is, the
answer is probably _not very._

------
joezydeco
How much space does it take up?

~~~
dfee
30GB. It’s not so much about the space. It’s the baggage of having access to a
ton of information. And the increased risk of losing my identity of my account
was hacked.

~~~
joezydeco
Which is more sensitive if your account is hacked? Emails from 20 years ago,
or emails from this past month?

~~~
dfee
Flip a coin. I probably have some emails from 20 years ago that contain health
information, SSNs, passport info, etc.

------
java-man
what is the problem with 20 years of archived emails?

~~~
dfee
Largely, the baggage of having 20 years worth of conversation at my fingertips
that is largely irrelevant.

I guess I could try and reconstruct my life with my emails, or of course,
someone else could - say my account was hacked.

~~~
stealthcat
Well it's your data, you could do some data science and NLP to study your life
since 20 years ago.

