Old emails

[nickbarnes]

I receive many thousands of email messages in my main work account (not counting my Climate Code Foundation account, which lives on gmail). It used to be a lot more (see statistics below), but it's still a huge number. For the last decade or so I have two main rules in dealing with email:

• 1. Never, ever delete a message: every message ends up in

Comments

[gareth_rees]

Here are my own statistics (sent plus received, by month):

[nickbarnes]

Yeah, gnuplot seems to have got like that. I think the open-source world needs more intermediate distros (or meta-ports, or library bundles, or whatever one might call them).
I think I could reasonably describe my approach as "inbox zero": my inbox is, in fact, empty most of the time.
Also, what happened in 2008?

[gareth_rees]

I think I could reasonably describe my approach as "inbox zero": my inbox is, in fact, empty most of the time.

Right, but you have an "outstanding" folder which sounds as if it has essentially the same role.

Also, what happened in 2008?

Good question ... investigates ... ah: September 2008 was the month when Apple Mail crashed badly (as described here) and as a result there's a Lost+Found folder containing duplicates of a lot of messages from that period. I excluded these from the search and re-ran the script. The graph above is, I think, now correct.

[p4user]

My mail history is in several data islands dating back to 1982. Some year I'll turn it all into something coherent and then I can publish nice graphs about it. I have some instant messaging records that date back earlier than that, but that doesn't really count as mail

[nickbarnes]

My archived messages never get seen again (unless I have to go looking for something, which happens maybe once every six weeks). Certainly they don't take up any brain bandwidth.

[jwburton]

Oddly, I've been using the GUI client now known as Apple Mail continuously since early 1989; I've never loved it, but in the early NeXT days it was so much more multimedia-capable than anything mainstream (and most people I sent email to were on NeXTs as well, that being the mainstream platform of my field in that era, and also popular among my friends) that my VMS mail skills atrophied and I never bothered to really master anything else. I used elm occasionally when I had to work over a modem, because like NeXTmail it used standard Unix mboxes. The mbox format is utterly lame, but I always told myself that it guaranteed me future migration freedom . . . then in OS X 10.5 Apple went to a proprietary format, and I revealed myself a hypocrite by not migrating out

[gareth_rees]

I'm startled by Gareth's sudden jump at the millennium, and wonder whether it reflects a change of archive strategy, or of communication habit.

I was unable to hold on to my work mail (including personal sent from work) from companies I worked at prior to 1999, so all I have from before that is personal mail sent or received at home.

[jwburton]

Ah, I see. Whereas for me, "work" email (embodying IP rights that someone cares about, so that I'm not free to treat it as personal) was a brand new concept when I left academia in 1997, and then migrated to appalling corporate systems (Lotus Notes) where I don't even think of it as mine any more in 2003. In fact, I actually did steal my work email from the intermediate period, because I was sure no one at the two companies involved (one dying, the other acquired) would notice or care, but there has never been a year when "personal" email was less than 80% of my I/O stream.