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):



(Plotted using the script I wrote here. Some measure of how much time has passed is that I had to reinstall gnuplot-I must not have had need of it since I bought this new laptop. Though I have to say my heart sank when I typed port install gnuplot and it said, "Dependencies to be installed: aquaterm gd2 xpm lua pango cairo libpixman xorg-xcb-util pdflib".)

I follow the "inbox zero" approach (and arrange for Apple Mail to file as much as possible automatically). I don't use my inbox as a to-do list: I don't want anyone in the world to be able to write to it!

[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.