I often come across folks who seem to delete nearly every email after they’ve read it. I’m not talking spam here, I’m talking about all email they receive.

I do not understand why people do this. My email archive is a treasure trove dating back to the mid-1990s. Family, business, volunteer work… It’s all there.

But it takes up so much disk space!

Balderdash.

In over 20 years of archiving nearly all non-spam messages, my Thunderbird master email directory and all sub-directories total a measly 7 GB.  I’ll leave you to figure out what a minuscule portion that is of my main 3 TB hard drive. Or, say, a modest slice of a 500 GB hard drive on a notebook.

Email is just text folks, and text is compact.

I have delved into my email archive many times to great effect.

You claim this, I claim that? I can provide you with a copy of our email trail. When did we agree to X? I can tell you it was July 21, 2005.

When did message board Y die? I can tell you that I was getting daily updates from it until Nov. 5, 2009.

But it’s such a mess!

I’ll hit you with another big Balderdash.

Search. Use search.

Folders. Use folders to file messages into.

Filters. Use filters to do filing automagically.

Computers are supposed to make our lives simpler, and they can, if we are willing to learn.

For many years, I’ve kept double archives, because I’ve set up my email in a way that all my addresses route through Gmail first, and are then forwarded to my host.

Gmail’s search is awesome. Gmail has tons of space, and if you run out, adding more is cheap.