Old emails

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 an archive folder; [I learned this the hard way, by deleting important messages. Disk space is free, more-or-less.]


• 2. Archive personal, public, and work messages in separate folders. [Also learned the hard way: when leaving a former job, I essentially had to leave my whole digital life behind.]

So how do messages get into folders? Any incoming message which I don't have to act upon is filed immediately when I see it. Everything else (maybe 10 to 20 messages on a typical day lately) goes into my "outstanding" folder, which acts as a to-do list. A lot of those I deal with and refile soon afterwards, but some form part of a long-running conversation and hang around in "outstanding" until they are resolved, and sometimes I don't get around to refiling them: they get buried under the flood.
So every once in a while (once a month, ideally) I go through the top few hundred messages in "outstanding", weeding messages to the archives. But despite this, maybe fifty messages in any given month get left behind and the folder steadily fills up. If I am particularly rushed or stressed, even this cleaning-up process doesn't happen, and "outstanding" bloats.

It's been hovering at about 10,000 messages for the last couple of years, and this week I had had enough (five-digit message IDs are depressing). On Wednesday morning and this morning, I went through the whole folder, looked at every message, and refiled ruthlessly. I have 400 messages left, almost all from the last four months.

This was an interesting and challenging process, travelling backwards in time over the last decade, cleaning out dense knots of the past from particularly difficult periods. 2008/9: dealing with the forced move down to Surrey. 2006: grieving for my parents and trying desperately to keep my marriage together, and learning the hard way that it takes two. 2003/4: childcare challenges when my wife started work away from home and the local schools were failing our younger child. 2000: a babe in arms, and a little boy on chemotherapy. All cathartic, but I'm not surprised I've been putting off this spring-clean for so long.

For any geeks in the audience, here are stats since 2003, from my mail logging system:

<table>

	Received		Sent
Year	Messages	Size	Messages	Size	Notes
2003	12,311	97 MB			End of year only
2004	241,868	1,650 MB	1,904	20 MB
2005	305,597	2,698 MB	2,220	15 MB	Life before spam-filtering: 800 messages every day!
2006	202,439	2,543 MB	2,067	30 MB	Spam-filter introduced at the end of 2006.
2007	58,241	765 MB	2,386	20 MB
2008	64,217	947 MB	2,478	36 MB
2009	50,518	788 MB	1,406	12 MB	Mailing list reduction as work changes
2010	44,383	1,501 MB	2,167	42 MB
2011	27,026	2,484 MB	1,096	6 MB	(fewer, larger messages)
2012	2,583	79 MB	169	5 MB	(to date).