This weekend I ended up jumping into my role of alpha-geek for my family and extended family. My mom uses Mozilla Thunderbird for her POP3 email client and she was having problems getting new email to download into her Inbox.
When I fired up LogMeIn to try and figure out what was happening with her machine, I got a little bit of a surprise.
Initially, I was impressed that she had nicely arranged her email into a variety of different folders. Then I became aware of the sheer number of folders that she had setup. I’m guessing there were about 40+ folders organized by topic, or sender or organization etc.
I then jumped into the main Inbox that was reporting the problem. When I got in there, there were still 1900+ emails. This was after my mom had already cleared out over 1500 emails into the other folders or trashed them.
As I got to looking at the different emails, I began wondering why she was keeping these messages. Did you she need them later for something? Or had she just not deleted them over the initial fear of thinking she needed something out of them later.
In my opinion email is NOT a storage mechanism for information. It’s a communication medium. If there are important details included in an email, extract the data you want to keep and put it in another format that’s better suited for accessing and organizing that data.
Do you keep all your emails? Why? Why not?
