I find that I never throw away an old e-mail. consequently, today is spent reading old e-mail and deciding if I want to keep it enough to cut and paste into a word document to put into a file.

(and I'm making a Lillith file from all of your nice words that are going in her memory box. thanks, guys)

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

Answers

Oh man... I seem to save email for no good reason. I save all the stupid "Hey i got your note" email, and lose the ones that have passwords and such. I save jokes that have gone around the net a thousand times.

Then a month later I go look in my inbox, and realize I have, like, 100 messages. Then I wonder "Why did I save that?" and go on a deleting frenzy.

Why do I do that?

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

my only "real" email right now is my work one - and i just save all of my sent mail. then i have like... ummm 15 folders or so. and i save all of the dumb ones too. notes from friends that say "yeah!" and "wow! that's cool!" and i have NO clue what they're talking about - i try and get rid of them but they seem to reproduce on their own. not to mention every URL anyone has ever sent to me in an email - i've got it. not as bad as my bookmarks though. i need bookmarks for my bookmarks. waaay out of hand.

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

oh yeah. i have three years worth of mailing lists and long distance relationship and all kinds of stuff in my eudora folders. i have folders in folders in folders. it's insane.

i'll never need that rehearsal schedule from six months ago, but i can't delete it, either.

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

Save e-mail? I can't, even if I want to!

I'm a throw-it-away freak. Magazines read? OUT with them! Perfectly good cheese that I know nobody will end up eating in the next 5 days? Bye bye!

Of course, as a result of impulsive trashing, I have to replace a lot of things. And, in the case of e-mail, I usually have to ask you guys (the weirdos that save your mail) to resend stuff. heh.

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

Yeah, I'm horrible at that. My inbox is never smaller than 200 some messages that I won't get rid of. Worse than that is that I hide hundreds more in folders. Anyone who's mailed me more than a few times has their own folder, so when my inbox gets over 300 some, I start moving messages into the folders.

I suppose I should go through the folders and get rid of all the "I'm leaving right now, I'll be there in 10 minute" sort of messages that really have no meaning, but they've built up so much of a mass that it would take me forever to go through them all. So the folders grow and grow, unseen.

God, my mail program automatically saves outgoing messages, so I have folders upon folders of those as well. It comes in handy every once in a while, but I suppose I should get rid of those that are more than a couple months old. Not to mention the ones that are over a year old.

boop boop

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

I'm at the point now at home where I can not save anything else on my computer at home because my email is so full. It's so full, I can't DELETE anything out of it - there's not enough memory for stuff like deleting files. Lords, what have I done?

I'm trying to be better about it now - especially since I'm using Pine and it all sits on the server until I delete. Still, every few weeks I'm wading through old emails, wondering how much of my life I'll spend re-reading worthless email. Too much.

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

Let's see, there's all my AOL mail backed up on Zip disks because I had to delete the AOL program when my geriatric computer had a breakdown. Then there are all the emails sitting in folders on my permanent account because said computer can't connect to anything at all right now and I can't connect to the Unix server from work.

Then there are three hotmail accounts filled with all the mail downloaded from my permanent account in the year since I've had sporadic direct access to that account. Worse still are my various versions of Eudora and Netscape with tons of mail in folders for each program.

Worst of all is the email I was saving for four years (forgot to back up) and a friend installing new system software accidently overwrote all my Netscape files, even though I told him I already had a more recent version.

So I guess the answer is yes, I do save old mail...I've got old mail everywhere!

-Sub

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

i save mail. important stuff anyway. i have a jillion free email addresses at which i hold TONS of old emails. every "flavor of the month" has his own folder. i keep the mail of the newest ones in a Men... Bah folder until they earn their own special folder. when i get hormonal (ladies... feel my pain) i read old mail and sob then i go on this deleting frenzy. so yes. i save old mail dammit.

-- Anonymous, August 19, 1999

Everything but Diary L.

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

You've got to be kidding. There are certain emails from certain individuals I keep, or special emails I want to keep, but otherwise...delete, delete, delete.--Al

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

I'm a total nerd about saving e-mail. But then again, I save EVERYTHING. I think I have every letter or card I ever got, too. I get way too sentimentally attached to THINGS, and I guess e-mail falls into that category.

AOL tells you you're reading message number X of Y. I have 5,815 messages in my AOL inbox! And I've only had this computer since April of last year. God knows how many old e-mails are on the old version of AOL on the old dinosaur computer we replaced, that we can't get started again.

I loved having Lotus Notes where I used to work. Wish I could use it with AOL. I loved having all the little folders over to the side and you could just whisk stuff into the folders as you got it. I kept way better track of my e-mail there, and would actually go through and delete stuff occasionally. With nearly 6000 e-mails to go through at home now, plus the ones on my free internet e-mail accounts, and not to mention all the SENT mail, that task is just TOO overwhelming!

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

i just spent the afternoon on the phone with my new boyfriend reading him e-mails he sent me five years ago when we were just friends...so yes, i save EVERYTHING!

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

Yeah, I save e-mails... but when I break up with someone, his folder gets trashed. The funny thing is, Travis (the guy I'm with now) and I wrote each other e-mail months before we started dating. I saved all of them - even my replies - for some reason. Right now in the Travis folder, I have 389 e-mails - both his and mine. I just can't bring myself to throw them away - even the little 1K ones that say stuff like "If you are home right now, get your butt online" or "Well, it turned out to be a pretty good day. Call me and I will explain :)". I have no clue what he's talking about there, but it doesn't matter. I can't throw it away.

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

I have e-mail dating back to 1993. I lost my first few months of e-mail on Prodigy, because the old DOS version of prodigy didn't have e-mail archiving capabilities at first. I still have a copy of the DOS version of Prodigy's mail manager, just so I can keep all that e-mail. I have e-mail from my ex boyfriend (I've only had one other boyfriend since I got online) saved in a special folder, so I have to keep that software around.

In 1994 and 1995 I mostly used Pine, so the only e-mail I have is what I saved as text files. (There's a disturbing amount of that e-mail, though.) I have my old Eudora software from 1996 and 1997 with literally thousands of messages.

I have every single e-mail anyone has ever sent me about any of my web sites, including all the flames and weird shit that came from Girl Talk.

I currently have 1,545 messages in my inbox, and that doesn't count all the stuff that goes through mail filters.

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

I'm on 4 mailing lists (2 for work, 2 for fun) and get about 200 messages per day from those. At work, e-mail is the way to communicate and I get dozens of messages per day, most with attachments. Since I'm an active user of USENET, I get a lot of junk mail. Managing my e-mail is the best example in my life of good organization;
 

I create lots of folders I delete entire subjects/folders when appropriate I save only the last message (with previous quotes) in a thread I trim unnecessary lines from saved and forwarded messages I process my e-mail the same way as I process my snail-mail; I first look for what I can delete, then scrutinize whats left

...now if I could only manage my physical possessions in a similar manner...

-- Anonymous, August 20, 1999

Actually, I print out e-mail that I really like... Anything clever or romantic or fun-- especially romantic. Anything I want to be able to have for later, to have to prove that, yes, once upon a time, someone write me romantic things.

-- Anonymous, August 21, 1999

boy do i ever keep old email. but i'm good at deleting some of it as well. i have about six different accounts and i've now decided that each of those accounts will be "for" a specific aspect of my life so that I can organize those trains of thought.

i'm going to lose my pine account in two months. and i'm a firm believer that that day is going to be one of the saddest that i'll ever remember.

i was just going through a purge session with that account and found mail that i had received back in '94. memories.

my work account now how an automatic "janitor" filter...so that every friday it deletes the email that it has placed in the systems folder. you have one chance for retrieving this email before it's gone forever.

i cringe every friday.

hey sabs! mwah.

-- Anonymous, August 23, 1999

I keep all personal emails, because my friends send funny ones that crack me up when I'm feeling grumpy, and because Tristan's are always very sweet and funny, and they bolster my spirits when he's too busy to call me or if we've had 'words'!

I try and clean out my in-tray every couple of days, but I only delete my sent mail every few months, so at least I know what I've said!

I get rude messages from our IT department if I keep too many emails, so that curbs me somewhat. I also print out particularly good ones, or anything I actually need to action.

-- Anonymous, August 24, 1999

Hey Tekay (and other Pine users),

I probably shouldn't mention this, because I'm only "enabling" you, but once you weed our the unnecessary mail in your university account, you can probably download it into either a web-based account or any sort of Netscape or Eudora type mail program.

Once you're ready, just move the mail into the IN box (sometimes you need to mark it as "new," it depends on your software) and then download it into the new software/mailer. If you're able to access the Pine account directly at the same time as the new account, you can do this process folder-by-folder, so that you don't have to sort through the mail all over again.

Jeez, this is pretty dorky of me, but I had to delete about 1,000 email messages so I'd have room when I started publishing web pages, so I know the drill.

-Sub2RainEN

-- Anonymous, August 24, 1999

i PRINT all mine out and put them with my letters and cards nstuff... although id ont save junk mail! :P

-- Anonymous, August 26, 1999