
We're all communication hoarders - akharris
http://www.aaronkharris.com/were-all-communication-hoarders-so-what
======
hkarthik
2 years ago, I embarked on a project to clean my 10 year old Gmail mailbox to
reach Inbox Zero, much like I have been doing at work.

The first few weeks were spent using filters to delete all the junk like
Newsletters, Flash Sales, Social Media Notifications, etc.

The remainder was all the personal correspondence. For nearly a year
afterwards, I would look through all the correspondence for a given month, and
delete or archive based on how meaningful things were.

I came across gems like the following:

\- Planning my wedding

\- Coming up with baby names

\- Celebrating my wife's completion of grad school

\- Younger siblings getting their first jobs

\- Threads with multiple people for planning a friend's bachelor party,
surprise birthday parties, etc.

\- Conversations with friends who have since passed away.

This stuff was archived and labeled "Precious".

I highly recommend that everyone go through this process. I plan to do it
again once a year from here on out.

~~~
isomorphic
The thing the article is missing is that algorithms will hopefully improve
along with storage capacity. That is, Google may be able to infer what is
"Precious" nearly as well as you can. The question is whether Google will
offer us that capability, or keep it for itself.

~~~
hkarthik
I think the technology and capabilities likely exist for Google or any other
entity to do this classification for us.

But it's a slippery slope. Do we want machine learning algorithms to show us
what to care about? Won't that somehow cheapen the uniquely human experience
of sifting through your own data and correlating it with your memories and
emotions at the time?

~~~
akharris
That's where we start slipping into the philosophical aspect of the
conversation. I don't know that a computer will ever be as good at discerning
meaning from our communication as we are - partly because a lot of the meaning
is because we say so, not necessarily because of something inherent.

But could they get to 50%? 90%? I hope so, because the load is so huge.

------
cortesoft
I keep all my email around because searching is so easy and useful.

So many times, I will find some reason to search for an old email that might
not have seemed important enough to save at the time; I might need to find the
date I did something on, or get the spelling of a friend's name that I never
thought I would need.

There is very little cost to keeping everything, and I certainly see benefits.

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, I note a lot of the people who say they hate having lots of old email at
their fingertips never bring up the benefits of being able to pull out useful
emails from years ago. I don't think they're lying, but their use case is
certainly different to mine (and yours, I'm guessing) because I always seem to
be _that guy_ who kept an email someone else finds very useful. I have a paper
trail for almost everything (and so does Google, but that's another story..)

~~~
nirvdrum
Maybe I'm just bad at email searching, but I've found having a large corpus
just means my search results get severely diluted. If I have to recall exact
phrases from emails to get meaningful results, then search has largely failed
me.

~~~
cortesoft
What email client do you use? I am sure that has a big effect on your results.

~~~
nirvdrum
I used to use Gmail and never could get search to work well in it. IIRC, it
wouldn't even stem words properly. I hope that's changed since. Nowadays I use
FastMail and its search is pretty good. But unlike Web search engines which
tailor results based upon your history, email search is pretty naive even
though I usually have a precise context in mind.

------
dctoedt
The late Dr. Randy Pausch, of Last Lecture fame, said that his rule was to
archive _all_ emails, no exceptions. [1] IIRC it was because he figured that
if everyone saved all their emails, it would would provide future historians
with a treasure trove of contemporaneous research material.

From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of
"spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the
judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed
was harmful to your case. You can argue that you didn't purge any _relevant_
emails, but that becomes a he-said/she-said issue.

[1] I believe it was in his Last Lecture at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo),
but it might have been his time-management lecture at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blaK_tB_KQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blaK_tB_KQA)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence)

~~~
keithpeter
" _From a legal perspective, purging emails can lead to accusations of
"spoliation of evidence," [2] which in some circumstances can lead to the
judge instructing the jury that the jurors can presume that what you destroyed
was harmful to your case._"

What if there was a policy to delete _all_ email older than some cut-off age,
e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?

~~~
dctoedt
> _What if there was a policy to delete all email older than some cut-off age,
> e.g. 2 years? Would that assumption still be made?_

You'd have to talk to a lawyer about the specific facts and circumstances, but
in general:

1\. If you didn't have reason to anticipate litigation when you implemented
the policy, it normally shouldn't be a problem;

2\. Once you do have reason to anticipate litigation, you're supposed to
suspend any such policy and preserve evidence; [1]

3\. If a dispute looks as though it's likely to turn into a lawsuit, your
adversary's lawyer likely will send you a "litigation hold" letter reminding
you of the duty to preserve evidence.

In situations 2 and 3, continuing with an automatic purging routine can get
you in trouble.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_hold](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_hold)

------
a3_nm
I still don't understand, what could be the point of deleting an email?

Privacy reasons? If you are hosted by some company, telling them you want to
delete something does not necessarily interact with their retention policy. If
you self-host, this is not a problem.

Storage space? Of course not, it is cheap. This is related to minimalism. I
try to minimize my material possessions, but for data, I don't find this
relevant.

Making it easier to find later, for you or your heirs? In that case, sure,
make a folder of "important" emails, have a way to exclude "useless" emails
from search by default. But this does not imply that you should delete them
for real.

Sure, it's an important and interesting problem to be able to find back the
emails that matter. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to keep the others just in
case.

------
doragcoder
Interestingly, I think that keeping everything can actually give us a much
more fuller account of our lives. If were are able to create an AI that will
help with the augmentation of all the data. I can really see something like:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ttep_ep1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ttep_ep1)

Which is what Gordon Bell
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLifeBits))
and Microsoft Research have been looking into.

~~~
woodchuck64
When they finally phase-in Deep Learning in Google search, the next step would
be to apply that to email databases.

------
chmars
I have been grateful for my 10+-year mail archive many times.

On the other hand, there's mail archive rot too:

I lost most of my mail archive around 15 years ago when a migration from my
Lotus Notes university account to several IMAP accounts went terribly wrong.
And many mails lost their metadata and/or attachments during later migrations.
All in all, however, my mail archive has remained very useful.

There is only one major issue:

I use Apple Mail due to its integration with my private CRM software and with
Apple Mail, you have to keep your mail archive in sync even if you use IMAP.
That means a few 10 GBs on each Mac I use - expensive storage in the age of
SSDs! Even worse, if you are on the road, you pay an addition toll for
expensive mobile data or (usually) slow data in public wifi networks etc.
Backup becomes more expensive due etc.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Instead of risking all that data why not pay for a Google Apps account under a
domain you control and make a backup using MigrationWiz.com to Google? Then
delete all the old mail from Apple Mail and start clean. You can use
MigrationWiz once a year to keep backing up your data.

~~~
chmars
I actually already use Google Apps for Business with my own domain name. For
my mail backup, I use CloudPull.

My main issue is really mail storage with Apple Mail plus various backups.

------
rev_bird
Aaron hits on an interesting point pretty much in passing: Gmail's UI is
pretty encouraging to the archiver vs. the deleter. The Gmail Android app, for
example, has a "swipe to archive" feature that lets me push the message back
to my archive with a single motion. If there were "swipe to delete," I'd
probably end up deleting a lot more.

The real reason I save so many messages, though, is honestly because it feels
safer to do so: It costs me essentially $0 to archive a message instead of
delete it, and if 10 years from now, there's a little transactional email that
helps me win a lawsuit or something, I'd be glad to have it. If I paid for
Gmail storage like I paid for storage elsewhere, I'd probably think a little
harder about the value.

~~~
vangale
There is a setting for switching to "delete" as the default swipe action. From
inside gmail: Settings -> General Settings -> Gmail default action.

~~~
rev_bird
Please excuse my late reply, I've spent the last week deleting EVERYTHINGGGG

------
shittyanalogy
I don't really understand why this is worth thinking about. It's not like I
can't have people over to my house 'cos my floor and couches are covered in
emails. It's not like I'm signing up for everything I possibly can just to
increase my collection of emails that I dream will one day be valuable. They
don't get deleted because, well for no reason at all. It's just not worth
thinking about. Worried about your kids not having precious correspondence to
hold on to? Print it out. Worried about google having all your emails after
you die? Pay a will executor to delete them for you. I just really don't
understand how this is anything worth even thinking about.

------
cheapsteak
Some of this could be solved if we could create "expiry filters" to delete
after __ days.

There's so much "junk" in my inbox that was actually important in the moment,
but by the time it's assuredly useless, a new wave of mail would have pushed
it out of sight and mind.

Service notifications (outage report, terms of service updates, watched Github
repos, 2-factor email auth codes, someone "followed" you), delete after a
week.

Newsletters - delete after a month.

Also merging might be useful - Receipts - merge by month after 6 months (email
templates for each retailer are pretty similar, group the items?), maybe
export to google drive / dropbox and clean itself up from my mailbox.

------
ajcarpy2005
The biggest culprit in an overwhelmingly large inbox is often newsletters
which we signed up for but are no longer interested in reading. Unsubscribing
from these can make e-mail a much more manageable and pleasant experience.

------
mrgriscom
In the ten years I've had gmail I've deleted probably... 10 emails total.
Archiving was one of the core innovations back in 2004 that made gmail be
gmail. I don't understand the people who obsess over the criteria by which
they delete vs. archive emails. I also don't understand the people who never
do either, and have 20k emails in their inbox. The product was clearly
designed to be used in a certain way. What compels people to go against the
grain so doggedly?

------
arnorhs
You know, personal emails to and from friends and family is probably the
smallest part of your gmail used space.

Feel free to never decide whether to delete those emails and keep them
forever.

Also, worth noting, is that gmail shares its storage with google drive and
google+ photos. So if you use a bunch of google drive/ g+ photos, you have
less space for email.

see
[https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6558?hl=en](https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6558?hl=en)

------
pervycreeper
The relevant variable is not strictly the volume of communication, rather the
density of important information contained therein. I frequently get annoyed
by the heaps of redundant and useless verbiage that somehow makes its way to
me. The medium of text messages (especially since smartphones have become
ubiquitous) is probably the worst culprit. We need more incentives to make our
communications concise.

------
kornakiewicz
This guy printed printed all facebook's conversation history with her
girlfriend and gave it for her birthday. I don't think such a thing would be
possible with other ways of communication.

His talks about it on TED talk during public proposal (starts about 11:00)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg6tgh7qprw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg6tgh7qprw)

------
wazoox
I keep all my email, back to 1997. I only delete (automatically) old mailing
list messages. Why not? From time to time I may dig up some useful information
I forgot.

I even at times run some scripts to get statistics from my email archive; for
instance how many times did I send failed disks to Seagate? Which customer
sends more support requests? etc.

------
code_duck
I'm still miffed that Excite and Netscape deleted mail I had saved from the
earliest days of my internet use. Mail from 2-3 years ago is dull, but after
7-10 it grows historic and nostalgia worthy.

------
frozenport
I have a folder called 'important' that contains sentimental items such as my
college admissions or my first research paper. I dont see why the author
simply doesnt orgonize important stuff!

------
kzrdude
You'll probably tell me it is futile, but I download and archive all my mail
from Gmail using Thunderbird, and make sure my Gmail account only contains the
recent months' worth of email.

------
peter303
People still email me pictures when they should email links.

------
vegabook
12 gig of email is a seriously mismanaged inbox unless you're hoarding
attachments too. I personally have a massive aversion to deleting mail because
I always believe there is that one message that might get me out of the
sh1tter in some edge case NSA/KGB/taxman/exGirlfriend scenario but.... 12
Gig!? That's like 12 copies of the encyclopaedia Britannica. Nobody is that
interesting.

I get 30 mails a day and with minimal every-3-months basic management (10
minutes max each time) I keep it under a gig. This is not that hard. Chucking
stuff out ruthlessly is actually liberating, and the converse is that keeping
all this crud indiscriminately is tantamount to a historic drag on your life.

That said, maybe those new 6-gig spindles have a life after all...

