Emails - do you delete them?

[brusselsprouting]

Talking to a friend earlier and realised I may be in the minority with what I do. They delete all emails after they have read/dealt with them. I simply read them then leave them - partly in case I need anything from it but also pure laziness.

So AIBU to not delete all my emails?

YABU- delete them when done with them
YANBU- read then keep them

I have my inbox set up with about 20 different folders - banking, bills, medical, DD, subscription info, work, online shopping etc.

Once a week on a Sunday I scroll through my inbox and sort everything into the right folder just in case I might need to reference them in future and delete any that are already dealt with (eg QR codes for tickers to the cinema that we went to on Thursday). Because I do it every week it literally only takes a minute or two.

Then once a year I skim through the folders and delete anything from the previous year. I have one single folder for things I need to keep long term/more than a year but there's only maybe a couple of hundred emails in there and I do periodically check through to make sure they all still need to be kept.

@MarchFourth

Keep them, because otherwise future historians/nosy parkers won't have much material to write your biography with.

"Reese Witherfork appeared to live a very mundane life, ordering the same food every week from Asda, and occasionally buying flat pack furniture."

I used to be like you and had literally tens of thousands of emails in my inbox, then I read about how much energy it takes for them to be stored and I spent a week going through them - I deleted them unless a receipt for something I still owned, then as emails came into my inbox, I unsubscribed from a ridiculous amount of newletters, and got better at deleting them as soon as read, unless a receipt. I now have less than 20 new emails and after the hassle of doing it all, I dont let my emails go over 50 now

ReeseWitherfork, 'appeared' is the operative word. I rest my case.

I have nearly 110,000 emails on my account. I have tried several times to delete them, but there's too many. And then my DP asks if I've got an email related to the volunteering we do. Why yes, I have! Good job I don't delete them!

I did try and delete some but it got boring going through them. I did unsubscribe to a load of them though so get less now than I used to.

@NeilBuchananisBanksy

What is the carbon footprint issue? I'd never associate it with an inbox?!

Because all those emails need to be stored on servers, which require power to keep them running.

"In the US, data centres are responsible for 2% of the country’s electricity use, while globally they account for just under 200 terawatt Hours (TWh)"

www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think

Inspired by this thread I've just deleted about 900 emails. I still have some more to do...I am determined to get on top of them!