You're throwing away all your history in doing so. Personally I never want to delete emails from loved ones, which is where most of the storage ends up going anyway.
I don't really understand why this is worth thinking about. It's not like I can't have people over to my house 'cos my floor and couches are covered in emails. It's not like I'm signing up for everything I possibly can just to increase my collection of emails that I dream will one day be valuable. They don't get deleted because, well for no reason at all. It's just not worth thinking about. Worried about your kids not having precious correspondence to hold on to? Print it out. Worried about google having all your emails after you die? Pay a will executor to delete them for you. I just really don't understand how this is anything worth even thinking about.
I don't delete sent message either, but I do go through my inbox from time to time and clear out things I don't think I'll care about in the future. That may very well bite me in the ass later on, but that's why god invented backups.
i guess im very pedantic - i don't want to make a rule to delete a email. i want it to bounce and never see my inbox and have the sender see that it bounced.
I try to go through and regularly delete emails I don't feel to be important. I archive the ones that I do want to keep, but the rest get deleted. I simply don't need to hold on to things like old conversations with my advisors about registration, emails from Facebook, Twitter, etc. containing updates, random emails amongst friends, and many more. I don't consider those to be spam, and some of them were definitely genuine email for the time, regardless of how you define something ambiguous like "genuine email", but I just don't feel the need to be a digital pack rat. There's a decent chance that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
Yes, a bit annoying. But sometimes you can give people a little break, delete the email, and move on. Unfortunately, expecting one's inbox to be as pristine as a sacred temple is no longer realistic.
I mean, your email is kind of an open box that people can stuff letters into. If you don’t like the letters from someone you can rip them up unopened (send to trash).
That's really not the point, though. Microsoft wrote code that will intentionally delete your email. It doesn't matter how unlikely that is or how bizarre the scenario is, that fact means I'll never use the service or recommend it to anyone. What if there's a bug in that code? Why risk writing code that deletes emails left and right? What's the point?
The Devs said "we’d love your feedback", and when people say "please don't ever delete my email", the response is basically "too bad, you have 270 days". It's insulting.
For that to be useful, the recipients on the other end would need to also delete the email. Otherwise, you've completely given control of that email content to everyone but yourself.
People who never delete (incoming) emails could just be lawyers. The lawyers' saying is, "Never discard a letter from anyone. Never write a letter to anyone." In other words, watch other people's on-record words and try not to leave any of your own.
I dare say that I don't expect automatic deletion of emails from your inbox is not a feature many users are clamoring for, whether they have privacy concerns or not. Hence I don't think the lack of it is for monetization puposes or the lack.
I still don't understand, what could be the point of deleting an email?
Privacy reasons? If you are hosted by some company, telling them you want to delete something does not necessarily interact with their retention policy. If you self-host, this is not a problem.
Storage space? Of course not, it is cheap. This is related to minimalism. I try to minimize my material possessions, but for data, I don't find this relevant.
Making it easier to find later, for you or your heirs? In that case, sure, make a folder of "important" emails, have a way to exclude "useless" emails from search by default. But this does not imply that you should delete them for real.
Sure, it's an important and interesting problem to be able to find back the emails that matter. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to keep the others just in case.
There was a time I deleted my emails while away from work, but after one particular incident, I swore never to do it again.
I had gone to visit my folks and while away, an old friend had sent me an email, which I deleted along with my regular cleanup. I came back to discover he had passed away (aged 26) and the last message he sent was to me along with an image of him in hospital. He had made arrangements with his family and we had access to all his accounts, including email, and the photo itself was still on his phone. So the message wasn't lost forever. But what if he hadn't?
After that, I decided to never delete anything unless I confirm it's of no further use.
In fact, every message I've ever received, except for spam, has been backed up on a local server, my laptop and the desktop as well as external USB(4) for the last 2 years or so.
I doubt something like that will happen again, but some things don't feel trivial though still intangible. Besides, storage is cheap (if we're not talking hi-res images/video).
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