Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago?

I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.

I routinely use it to look what a given product I bought and paid for, and by extension how old it is.

Also to reminisce how cheap stuff was.

So, yes

Maybe not “need” in the strictest sense, but there have been more times than I can count where digging up old mail has either made things much faster and easier or helped me answer a random question that popped into my head about something that happened ages ago.

Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.

Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.

Not on gmail but a company I worked for sent me my pay slips over email. While I also printed them, I also forwarded them to my private email address and kept them to this day on a separate mbox file.

How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.

> Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.

What's the advantage to deleting? It's easy to ignore anything old and disk space is cheap. Do you delete old photos?

When I was moving to Canada I had to dig stuff back from 6 years before!

That's why I keep all of them

All the time. I read an interesting thing about someone online, and that name strikes me as someone I have interacted with. I search my email archive, then reply to that thread or start a new one to catch up. All of them have been super happy, “wow! You replied to our email from 10 years ago!”

I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/email/

At least a few times a year. Usually looking for old orders either model number or "how old is this thing" or how much it cost over time

I have, but very rarely. I could count on one hand how often I’ve needed to dig back more than half a decade ago.

Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.

I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.

Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.

I backed up lots of emails that I deemed precious, but I still search through email first, because sometimes it's just easier to search email than to search my backups.

Also, oftentimes I search email not so much for the content, but to find the timestamp associated with a particular event. I have had to search old email metadata a few times when I get an unexpected question related to time (for example, gmail will ask when you created the account as part of its account recovery process).

I've enjoyed digging up an old flight itinerary to see how much I paid back in 2015 or just looking at the messages a company replied in support and realizing I'm not buying from them again because they didn't fix the problem.

It has happened, but it's rare.

I let it pile up, rarely delete anything except marketing emails. Over 30K emails in my gmail inbox.

Yes, looking for old documents proving things for the government.