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).
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.
Should a person be able to delete an email they sent to someone else after the other person has received it? How about a letter you mailed? Should you be able to go into their house and take the letter back? It’s like trying to unring a bell. Once you send it, you no longer own it; the recipient does.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I guess it’s like shredding mail is completely normal, but in a digital world we’ve become accustomed to the idea that you keep every single letter forever.
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.
Yea, but sometimes people will empty their Trash though. If it was archived with a 'remove after 30 days' tag on it, it wouldn't really be possible to accidentally purge all such emails.
I'm an executive at a nonprofit and I delete all unsolicited email unopened. I just don't have time for it. I don't know how typical I am (small organization and it's part time for everyone involved)
I've seen this with people that receive tons of email as well. They're out for a month and have 10k emails to sort through. Instead of doing that, they send a message to everyone who sent them an email that if it was important they should re-send. Then just delete everything.
I don't understand why anyone would think letting a company take your mail, read it, make a database from scanning its contents, then decide what you get to see from it, is preferable to the seconds it takes to throw a few envelopes in the trash.
Ooh, here, let me give you my email passwords so you can delete all the spam from my inbox too...
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 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.
Why would you delete emails? I still do not get people's email habits. I used to maintain my inbox back in the days before all the normies came online. Now I just scan, read the things that interest me, and move on. Same for every email...work, school, and personal.
I think you and me treat email differently than the average person. I saw my friend's email the other day: 26 thousand unopened emails. And he doesn't mind at all. Sometimes he searches through a few days worth to see if there is anything interesting. I think his use of personal email is much more common than my perfectly organized, and usually 0 unread messages inbox.
reply