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Hoarders vs. Deleters: Your inbox

spicyapple

spicyapple

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 20, 2006
1,724
1
You are your inbox.

I'm a hoarder, but I disagree that my life is cluttered in other areas. And I don't think I have unfinished business in my life.

I keep my emails because most of it is business related and I need to keep them for record-keeping. But I also keep all my personal correspondence because they're special even if short and casual. What if the person on the other end of the email correspondence dies, I like to remember them any way I can.

Why delete stuff that doesn't take up much room, anyway? I could store all my email messages and then some on a single DVD-R.
 
I try to keep my inbox pretty tidy...I get annoyed if there are enough messages that I have to scroll to see them all. I just leave stuff that needs attention in the inbox and everything else gets moved to other mailboxes. I used to hoard just about everything in mailboxes, but have recently gotten rid of a lot of it. There are a few areas of my life where I still keep every single message just in case I need one again at some point, but I do a lot more deleting these days.
 
I remove e-mails from the Inbox when they're dealt with. Not sooner, not (much) later. Some I delete some I just move to a mailbox for archiving purposes.

My Sent mailbox, on the other hand has been known to fill up every know and then. Even if I usually keep that too fairly clean it can, in busy periods, reach several hundred mail before I force myself to clean it...

Mail is much snappier with a handful of messages rather than hundreds (or thousands) in the Inbox and Sent. Much, much snappier!
 
Hoarder at home (love Spotlight), deleter at work — capped mailboxes on the office PC network.

Also, hoarder of PMs from here. When PM boxes are full, all PMs are downloaded, stored and stashed in a folder for more Spotlight goodness. ;)
 
mad jew said:
I keep all of my emails but not in my Inbox. They're moved off to other areas of my Mail app and my Inbox is kept empty if possible.
Click to expand...

Yeah, me too. My inbox is for stuff that needs attention soon, and when it's empty I've done it. I have a folder that says "For reply" which I put other less urgent stuff that I don't want to file away, but I'll deal with in the future.

I keep everything else in giant, slightly messy folders. So I suppose that is sort of accurate, because I tend to be organised on the outside, but if you open my cupboards, loads of junk falls out. :p

(Oh, and I think the article's saying that the state of your Inbox is the key, not whether you keep old mails or not. It's whether you file them. My boyfriend keeps every single email he's ever received in his Inbox. On Webmail. This makes me want to cry. :p)
 
Not much to delete when no business is involved and receipt of personal mail is as frequent as snow in summer.
 
Google archives every email I receieve, I have it set to do so. In Mail, I have another Archive folder for particularly important emails I feel the need to same. I keep 3 or 4 emails in my inbox usually which I need to sort out.. like a to do really. Other than that, my inbox is empty.
 
XIII said:
Google archives every email I receieve, I have it set to do so.
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Gmail has also allowed me to be a hoarder with far more origanization than ever before... ;)

I have archives of mail from back in the 1980s from various VMS and unix systems... Wish I could easily get them into gmail... (I'd have to find 'em first ;))

B
 
I'd say I'm a lazy deleter. My inbox gets "full" more so because I'm lazy than it is because I want to save everything. I just have a tendency not to go through the emails and delete them as often as I should. But I like my inbox best, especially at work, when it's clean and minimal. It usually means most or all of my work is done! :)
 
I'm a deleter. I like everything in my inbox to fit in the window without scrolling. If the list of messages I ough to keep gets longer than the message window is big I usually save them to my HD and start over.
 
My Inbox never has anything in it. It's filed in another box and responded to the minute it comes in.

I guess that is why I have a problem with people who don't answer e-mails, because I respond straight away. :)
 
I never delete my e-mail because I rarely use it. I just never have the time. However, I am obsessive about keeping my HDD's files organized. Everything has a folder and nothing goes on the desktop unless it is going to be immediatley moved or deleted. That being said, I delete EVERYTHING I know I am not going to use, except for school-related documents.
 
iGary said:
Oooh, I save everything, it's just sorted.

I have one person with almost 3,000 e-mails in their box. :eek:
Click to expand...
I just checked, and I have 9002 messages in my box. :eek:
I think it's delete time. Thanks for the reminder. :)
 
iGary said:
Oooh, I save everything, it's just sorted.

I have one person with almost 3,000 e-mails in their box.
Click to expand...
Is it Rob?:p I keep just about everything Lori sends me - since more of our discussions have been over IM, I've only got 600 emails from her (still more than any 5 people combined...)...
 
All project details are usually a combination of exchanges of emails. So I keep every email I send and receive, and they get shuffled off to their respective folders. Everything is organised via rules or manually.

I have 0 unread emails (some emails I get, I automatically set to read - I can search through them later) in my inbox. And 88,000+ emails in my inbox. I have a Microsoft Exchange Server essentially to myself.

Personally, I'm generally a slob. So offline actions doesn't necessarily reflect my online practices. What I do with email is out of necessity.
 
All my email, I save on my Gmail server. So I delete it as it comes in. Really, with 2GB of memory (I'm getting close to 3 now!!! :D) what's the point of keeping it on your computer?
 
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