Saving purchase confirmation emails - do you?

[msbossy]

Since losing my luggage as a student I've become obsessive about saving the receipts for anything I'd want to make an insurance claim for. These days I make a lot of purchases online and try to do the same, but it's less easy.

I think it would be a good idea if retailers attached a copy of the receipt as a text or PDF file so you could save it rather than have hundreds (shoppaholic ) of emails hanging around.

Do insurers still need receipts as proof of purchase? Do they expect you to have your email receipts from online purchases?

I made a file in my inbox called 'shopping confirmations' and drag/drop relevant mails into it. Then they're always available but don't clog up the rest of the place :)

I do the same - have a email folder called 'purchases' and put everything there. Once an item has been delivered though you usually get a receipt/invoice with it so you can save it in the normal way. (In a cluttered drawer with millions of other bits of paper )

I am a CM, so have to keep all receipts for the taxman, I save all into a receipts file, filed monthly in the file. makes it so easy come tax time.

Good to know I'm not the only one! It sounds like you all rely on your email client for filing. I use laptop, phone & work laptop so just use gmail lately rather than an email client with folders etc. I guess I'm going to have start saving the emails to my home laptop. What an exciting start to 2011

If you use gmail, you can use labels instead of folders.. Create a label called 'Purchases' or 'Receipts' and you can move the receipt emails to that label & get them out of your inbox, or just archive it and it will always turn up when you look at that label.

The advantage of labels is that you can put more than one on an email. So, for example, if you had to claim on something you could then add the label 'insurance' to the relevant receipt and to any correspondence with your insurers so you could have it all together.

I always save the confirmation page into a receipts folder. Just select "save as" from the file menu.

if you save your junk mail that is only printed on 1 side then you can print your purchase receipts/confirmations on to the back and keep these just as you would a paper receipt from a shop & you are not wasting any more paper

Thx. I'm going to try Rustybear's suggestion and attempt to save them all to my laptop.

Rustybear -. I've started with labels but i still don't trust a web email client enough for that to be the only place these things are stored.
Bran - have had probs prev with the content of emails not saving properly - hence my suggestion that retailers should provide an easy to save attachment. Will try again tho (I work in IT so shouldn't really get put off by these things so easily!)
Mollymole - good suggestion also but I've recently scanned all my other paperwork and am down to one file and a box of receipts so would prefer an e-solution.