I'm having a mini existential crisis about what happens to documents when you email them

[suchafunnybear]

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic about the existential crisis.

I'm one of those people who never deletes emails. I was just reminiscing about something from over twenty years ago and thought my friend had emailed about it at the time. I searched my emails and discovered that she had, and there was a document attached. I downloaded it and the document appeared on my phone fully in tact.

But... where has that document been for the last twenty years?

My friend no longer has the email address she sent it from, or the same computer.

I no longer have the computer I would have originally downloaded the document onto.

So for years and years that document hasn't existed and now it suddenly does again.

Has it been hanging around in cyberspace all that time? How?

If I had deleted the email would the document have ceased to exist, or would it still be lurking in cyberspace, but inaccessible?

I'm probably not making any sense but it just doesn't make sense to me.

I think maybe it lurked in a cloud?

It's been sitting in your email account - where she sent it to. Makes no odds if she still has the same account or which device you access it on - it's in your emails. If you had double deleted the email - e.g. to trash and then emptied trash - then it would have disappeared for good.

The server? Ie outlook or whatever provider you use?

if you delete the email it might be inaccessible to you (or you might be able to recover it from the deleted mail inbox).

However deleting things on your end doesn’t delete it entirely. A criminal for example might find that the police can obtain the deleted emails by other means. Your workplace might be able to access the deleted emails from the admin side of the enterprise account

Assuming you are using a service such as Gmail or Hotmail, the document has been in the same place for the past 20 years. By sending it / attaching it to an email via this service, you have uploaded a copy of the document to your email provider. The email provider will have vast amounts of file storage, a small amount of which is allocated to you. Physically, there will be a physical storage device (server) where the file actually resides (likely multiple servers actually, but let’s not get overly technical). When you delete the email from your sent items, it probably wont be actually totally destroyed, but the link to it will be, in a way that makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to access the document again.

This, it’s just been in your emails all this time.

The attachment, like the email are there, it doesn’t matter where the email came from or if the attachment exists anywhere else downloaded on a laptop, that’s just how email storage works.

Ah, thanks.

I get it now. So it's always been there, stored by my email provider.

I was sorting of picturing it like a letter that's not delivered till I download it and I was getting confused about how it could be delivered if it doesn't exist anymore.

But of course it did still exist.

Thanks all for answering my stupid question.

Yeah, just see it as a form of cloud storage perhaps as the integrity of email attachments is covered in the storage that comes with your email account.

Yes if gmail, hotmail whatever it's been a file sitting on some storage in a google/microsoft datacentre (more than one copy). It will have been moved around in 20 years i.e copied over to new storage on new stoarge arrays/file servers as they upgraded and replace old hardware but yes, essentially, in the cloud i.e on machines in google/microsoft's data centres.