Archive or Delete?
38 comments
·November 5, 2025Titan2189
xmlninja
Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.
marginalia_nu
It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".
But don't do
Stuff
Junk
Stuff /
Stuff / Stuff
Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...
debugnik
I've been telling myself I'll organise my now 4 layers nested stuff folders for 15 years.
A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?
qwertox
I moved my old pc into a vm. The vm is the new folder.
saghm
I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".
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!
yesfitz
I'm an unrepentent "neither".
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.
jcul
Yup, another inbox only user here. Unread means it's a to-do.
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.
dinkleberg
I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.
rezonant
I was inbox-only since GMail was in beta, and received tons of email notifications and extraneous mail over that 20 year period that didn't get read.
My inbox was at about 100k _unread_ emails with about 280k total.
I am happy to say I am now at inbox-zero (ish).
null
BeetleB
> If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
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!
dmje
Terribly triggered by this
toast0
Sorry, but unless I can manage my email with sensible rules, I'm not going to manage it.
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.
Scribesley
[dead]
jabroni_salad
My inbox's default retention policy deletes anything that is more than 90 days old unless it has a tag. Receipts, billing statements, messages from real people that I added to my contacts etc all get tagged and retained. Your newsletters, the OTPs, the appointment reminders all fall into the abyss.
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.
BeetleB
I use notmuch, which is tags based.
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.
ahmedfromtunis
I only delete spam and such useless emails. Other than that, I just mark email as either read or unread. I never archived an email.
I also maintain an always zero inbox and everything is neatly classified thanks to the power of automation.
Mogzol
I keep emails in my inbox until they are no longer relevant (which may be immediately for some emails) and then 99.9% of the time I delete them. I archive maybe a half dozen emails a year, and delete the rest.
8organicbits
I dislike that the Gmail app on Android only lets you archive an email from the notification; fastmail has both archive and delete buttons.
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.
drivers99
Which camp is it if you don't even look at or read email unless you know there's something specific you need in it? I have 100,000 unread but that's because I did a concerted cleanup sometime in the last couple years. I even unsubscribed to a bunch of stuff. I am planning to tackle it again this month. I've heard of people who use Black Friday as a good trigger on what to unsubscribe from as every company wants to send you something for that.
clnhlzmn
I haven't seen this option yet: archive things you think are important, delete things you think are not important, but don't permanently delete anything. Just use archive and trash as folders of differing degrees of importance. If you run out of storage you can manually delete some of the oldest items in the trash and be pretty sure you didn't need those things (but this will never be necessary because who runs out of email storage).
Bender
Neither for me on the server. I "move" the emails via IMAP(s) to a local folder in Thunderbird. Thunderbird gets backed up to an encrypted NAS. The NAS gets backed up to multiple encrypted external NVME/SSD drives and placed in lock boxes. One lock box ends up in a vehicle. Data not on the server can not be leaked unless legal hold was enabled creating archives outside the visibility and control of the user.
Amorymeltzer
>Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
>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.
jghn
archive.
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
getnormality
I leave everything in the inbox and mark unread if I need to follow up. Following up may involve nothing more than a note about the task on my to-do list. I also delete a lot of useless stuff and have never regretted it.
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.
Then there's the 3rd option: Neither
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)