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February 09, 2004
hoarders
my co-worker charles posed an interesting question when we were discussing the hoarder.
do people hoard e-mail?
i bet they do.
Posted by lisa at February 09, 2004 01:57 PM | TrackBack
Comments
i think ray has about 1500 messages in his inbox.
Posted by: christa on February 9, 2004 02:46 PM
i keep all my old email that's not spam or an archived email list. it's potentially important data, you know? storage is cheap and easy, and i might want to play with it at some later point.
Posted by: cooper on February 9, 2004 03:48 PM
i have extensive archives of both received (non-junk) mail and sent mail, but they're carefully organized and maintained.
i guess the critical question is, if people hoard email, is there a point where it's destructive behavior?
a co-worker recently told me that he has about 4000 messages in his inbox.
Posted by: lisa on February 9, 2004 11:54 PM
I try to clear out my inbox every day, or at least get it down to where I know more-or-less what's in there. I like it to stay between 0 and 20 messages, or at least as low as I can get. I file some stuff to keep and other stuff to throw away after a while. My "misc" folder is where everything goes prior to being thrown away. When I think of it, I purge it back to a month old, keeping everything newer. I looked to see how many messages it has, because I haven't purged it lately; at the moment, it has 12,521. The oldest is from the beginning of October, so I guess I have about 3 1/2 months of messages to throw away just out of that folder. I have other folders to purge too.
I'm not counting anything that comes to postmaster@duke.edu, majordomo-owner@duke.edu, or the like. Those go in separate queues. However, I probably do have a copy of almost everything I've personally answered out of those queues in the past 8-9 years. And those answers have often been valuable, or at least satisfying.
But I know people much, much worse than me. I know two people who who never clean out their inbox and never throw away anything. They occasionally archive the whole damn thing, maybe pulling some things out to seed the next one, and start over.
It's totally fucking sick. When all you have are computers, everything starts to look like a file. If you're a NIX geek, everything *is a file. ;)
Posted by: Joseph H. Vilas on February 13, 2004 12:18 AM
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.