How long do you keeps emails from websites like Amazon?

[Michael Scrip]

Every time I place an order at Amazon, I get three emails:

"Thank you for your order"
"Your order has shipped"
"Your order has been delivered"

And it's the same for other online retailers.

Is it necessary to keep these emails forever?

All my orders for almost 20 years are available on the website if I needed to print an invoice or whatever. (which I never have)

I frequently look at my past orders on the website... but I've never looked through my email for a past order.

Most websites where you log into has a history of your orders and receipts. So I'm not seeing a reason to keep thousands of redundant emails.

Thoughts?

 

[joevt]

Most websites where you log into has a history of your orders and receipts. So I'm not seeing a reason to keep thousands of redundant emails.

That's fine, until that history disappears one day. Move the e-mails to a Credit Card Transactions or Amazon sub folder and forget about them. Until you need to remember something.
Maybe you'll need the info for an insurance claim or for writing your memoirs or whatever.

25 years ago, I bought SoundJam MP Plus for $29.95 from Casady & Greene, Inc using the digitalriver.com store. Order Date: 14-AUG-00. Neither of those still exist.
I bought a VHS movie from Amazon same year November but the website doesn't show anything earlier than 2012. Oh wait. Switching from amazon.ca to amazon.com shows earlier orders.
I might have lost some e-mails previous to those.

 

[Michael Scrip]

That's fine, until that history disappears one day. Move the e-mails to a Credit Card Transactions or Amazon sub folder and forget about them. Until you need to remember something.
Maybe you'll need the info for an insurance claim or for writing your memoirs or whatever.

Good points. Maybe I'll just keep the Order Confirmation emails and delete the Shipped and Delivered emails.

What are the chances Amazon will delete my order history before Google gets rid of GMail?

🙂

25 years ago, I bought SoundJam MP Plus for $29.95 from Casady & Greene, Inc using the digitalriver.com store. Order Date: 14-AUG-00. Neither of those still exist.
I bought a VHS movie from Amazon same year November but the website doesn't show anything earlier than 2012. Oh wait. Switching from amazon.ca to amazon.com shows earlier orders.
I might have lost some e-mails previous to those.

I remember buying CDs from EBay in the late 90s and early 2000s in college using my old college email address.

Years had passed and I couldn't log into EBay anymore using that address... and I created a new EBay account. So I lost all that old order history.

But I also don't have those CDs anymore either! Whoops!

BTW... the earliest Amazon purchase that I can find from either the website or my email is from 2010... a replacement Blackberry trackball...

🤣

 

[aperfectcircle]

I have an invoices folder in Mail where I file away order confirmations for anything major or reasonably expensive, or if it’s something I think I might want to refer back to later on for some reason. Otherwise it’s straight to the trash. The exception is probably Amazon and a few other larger e-commerce sites as I’ve never bought anything major and trust they’ll be around long enough that if I did want to look back I can use the online order history.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I usually keep (archive) the receipt, but discard all others...eventually.

Normally I'll delete the e-mails, as I get newer notifications (about the same shipment), like:

I order something and get: "Thank you for your order", keep it (as a note to self) until:
I get the next: "Your order has shipped", now I delete "Thank you for your order",
Then, when getting (the shipment) and the: "Your order has been delivered", I delete "Your order has shipped" (and more often than not the "Your order has been delivered" mail, too, unless that also contains the final receipt).

 

[maflynn]

If you're not running out of space from your provider, then just create a sub folder and save them. I have emails dating back to when my icloud email was created. Do I need them? Probably not but I have needed to go back to old emails. Just the other month I had to search to when I bought my kids apple watch. If I had cleaned out my email that information would have been lost.

 

[eyoungren]

In the game of space available over the years (data caps on your phone, caps on texting, hard drive size for computers, capacity for phones, capacity for cloud services, etc, etc), the amount of email space provided was among the first to go. Meaning, email providers (in general, not all) stopped making the amount of space for email an issue a long time ago.

I cannot recall the last time Google or Yahoo mentioned how much email space they offer as a selling point for their email.

Once I realized this, I stopped archiving my email. With one or two exceptions, I do not create folders or file email. I just let it sit in the InBox. I can scroll down. Or search.

All I delete is stuff that is obviously junk mail. With virtually unlimited space, I really have no need (for myself) to worry about organizing this stuff.

I can provide the very first email in my inbox from the day I created my Yahoo email account in 1999.

 

[Madonepro]

I may be an outlier here, but I have always been pretty productive in managing emails.
Of an email contains a document (invoice/receipt) the document gets filed, if it has a product code/serial number etc, it gets copied to a text file of suchlike, and order emails, that have a web based account, get deleted after the item arrives.
Conversations on email, that don’t meet the above, and are not personal/family related, get saved as an email archive in my documents folder.
Personal/Family/Friends emails get saved in corresponding email folders.

I store my files in iCloud, and copy the ‘documents’ folder onto a 4TB SSD a couple of times a month.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I usually delete the order email but, I save the shipping email until I have the item in hand. Should the item purchased be $1K or more, I will hang onto the roof of purchase email in a spacial folder in iCloud. I recently did this with B&H Video as my oder was $3400. That way, if proof is ever needed for warranty purposes, I have a copy.

 

[Corefile]

Nov 11th 2005 is the oldest Amazon shipping email I have.