Archive or Delete?
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
email-is-good.comTechstory
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Email ManagementDigital DeclutteringProductivityData Storage
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Email Management
Digital Decluttering
Productivity
Data Storage
The post discusses the decision between archiving and deleting digital content, particularly emails, and prompts reflection on digital management strategies.
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Nov 5, 2025 at 2:07 PM EST
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad
(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)
I need to be able to have rules that let me move email automatically after it's been read or after it's been in the Inbox for some time. But that's not really possible with most server side rules engines (they only look at mail when it arrives), client side rules engines are dead and I don't use email from a fixed desktop machine anyway, and I'm not going to write an imap based filtering engine (I did it once on company equipment, and it wasn't fun enough to do it again).
So Inbox 40,000 it is.
https://marcoapp.io
Pegasus Mail was very good when it owned the mail (pop3), and works ok with a competent IMAP server, but work switched to Exchange and it was very slow, and Pegasus didn't work well with a slow IMAP server. That was the start of my slide into inbox 40k :(
The goal is for it to apply the rules and followup with actions while still letting me interact with my email from any client I want.
I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!
But don't do
That's a rookie strategy, do When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?
If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.
Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.
5 years ago, I dropped down to 20 labels, and started routinely deleting anything over 5 years old except for a specific "keep forever" label.
No regrets. No instances of searching for old items and not finding them, etc.
I was able to boot macos in a VM and migrate my laptop. It "ascended" into virtuality.
Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!
Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.
What if you read an email, and need to do something, but can't do it right now? Do you mark it as unread so you can deal with it later?
I did that for years. Thankfully no longer!
Rinse, repeat
Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.
There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.
It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.
My inbox was at about 100k _unread_ emails with about 280k total.
I am happy to say I am now at inbox-zero (ish).
In Gmail you can set it to group all unread at the top.
Sometimes I'll open an email and mark unread again if I need to come back to it.
I've got 100k+ threads in my inbox and full text search is single digit ms.
IMAP search itself is unusable. SQLite on the other hand...
https://marcoapp.io
1. Receipts, bill, utilities, etc. (Sublabel for every company)
2. Friends&Family (Sublabel for every person)
3. School and school related (Sublabel for every person)
4. Government and government related (Sublabel by organization)
5. Random and miscellaneous
It's archive, but somewhat organized
I use Thunderbird a lot, so Archive is an anti-pattern (I believe it removes all tags from an email, leaving it only in All Mail. I have All Mail turned off in IMAP because it makes a second copy of everything, which is bad in a 20+ year old mail archive.)
That's a good idea. I also use app updates to decide whether I actually need to keep an app on my phone. (There is a convenient "remove" swipe on that screen, so I'm not the only one.)
You’ll rarely keep something you’ll use again. Just the knowledge of the heap of junk is a mental drag.
If it’s really important, archive it. But anything less, just tell yourself you’ll get by somehow. Less is more.
I have partial/spotty archives going back to the early 90s, which then turn into a full archive starting in 2004. It's not often but there are plenty of times where it's been useful to be able to dig up some nugget from 20-30 years ago to answer a question. And also, sometimes it's just fun to go on a nostalgia trip
But I personally do not like email as a system of record. My response to 'what if I need to know something about the tires' is that I keep a spreadsheet with everything I do to my car.
I also maintain an always zero inbox and everything is neatly classified thanks to the power of automation.
Any actual two way communication with another human absolutely gets archived. I love myself an audit trail. It's saved my ass more than once.
This has always been my strategy, though some might say I'm closer to "archive almost everything". I still do a lot of deleting, though. Deleted mail tends to fall into the following broad categories:
- security alerts and passcodes - notifications for events happening in a different systems (e.g. Venmo payments, bank alerts, etc.) - receipts for non-durable things like restaurants
I guess I could try to move these more forcefully from email versus phone notifications, but this still is really low priority and it's kind of better to just deal with it in a batch at the end of the day.
Archive instead of delete is what we recommend to Inbox Zero customers. As you won’t accidentally delete something important.
But if you really need to claim back that space our tool offers ways to delete the stuff that doesn’t matter.
Mails are PARTIALLY spread in a taxonomy via MailDrop but partially because keeping my filters is tedious...
My inbox is (1) things I need to read (2) a big searchable archive of things I might need later. Nothing more, and certainly not my to-do list. So I don't feel the need to do anything more than I'm doing.
The most important thing is not what to do with emails in your inbox, but figuring out what should go in the inbox to begin with.
I have a whitelist. Anything not in the whitelist goes into "quarantine". I give some details here:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807
Once we take care of the bulk of emails that way, it's easier making decisions on the items in the inbox. I usually delete if it's some automated email (e.g. calendar reminder, etc). I archive if it's personal or may have some useful information I want to refer to later (e.g. notification that my electricity bill was paid).
But I lie. Even when I "delete", I don't delete. I merely tag it as "deleted". It's always there on my hard drive. Normally when I do a search, I have to specify "and not tag:deleted".
And those quarantined emails? I neither delete nor archive. They just stay there with the "quarantine" tag.
- 1:1 or 1:n conversations get archived
- appointments, receipts, ... snoozed until day before use/event, then deleted afterwards
- newsletters, automated messages deleted after read
- promotions, discounts, ... deleted immediately
The trash serves as a 30-day buffer for things I may need to recover, e.g. shop discounts I threw out that I end up needing before they expire.
I also use Fastmail's expiration period on my inbox, so anything older than 1 month is deleted too. If it received no action in 1 month, the chances it was actually important are close to zero.
Delete: Everything
>Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
Basically what I do, but the problem for a certain type of mind is that "might be useful" is a pretty broad category to fall down. "Years and years of Perl mailing lists in case I want to search them instead of SE/PerlMonks/etc." Yeah, in theory. "Any newsletter I haven't ever read?" I mean, in theory I might search for something from 2011. "ThinkGeek purchases from back in the day?" Yes, definitely! So, in practice, just archive, and let your search results be polluted by daily newsletters.
Still, I try and keep Merlin Mann's Wisdom advice in mind:
>Organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.
That being said, though, there's a line that only becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on: family and friends >>> everything else. I'd take a relative's email I didn't want to reply to when I was in college over pretty much anything. Do whatever you need to do to keep that.
I'd like to have a retain-for-one-year button, to move things out of my inbox, but not keep them perpetually. I'd rarely delete immediately, and I'd seldom archive for eternity.