For personal email, I use Gmail. Just recently I was noticing I have hundreds or thousands of emails from back when I was in college (6 years ago). Everything from communications to/from other students to professors and faculty.

Is it really worth keeping all of these? I have plenty of storage space left, but how long do YOU keep emails?

With gmail? Forever. The capacity is expanding as fast as my usage grows (and if I wanted to I could find some large attachments to delete), and cleaning out old messages would be a huge amount of work both now and ongoing. There's not much value in doing so.

6 years is nothing. In my Outlook, I still have e-mails from 10 years ago (the year before that, I had a major harddrive crash that lost everything from before that). I keep 'em around just in case I need to refer to something said earlier, mainly through my job. The e-mail archive files have migrated over from Outlook XP, to Outlook 2003, and all the way to Outlook 2010, and over the years, I've been forced to split up the archives in "year" (or "year range") categories, simply because the single .pst file was growing too large for the file system.

This doesn't include my @gmail.com messages, though, where I still have e-mails from 2007 (not counting the "welcome" mail from Google in 2005, when I actually signed up with Gmail). I don't plan on deleting any of these.

The only e-mails I've ever deleted (as far as I can recall), are newsletters I've finished reading, and test messages (sent to myself for testing a correctly set up website, contact form, or e-mail server).

From sweh Tue Oct 18 21:10:11 1994

That might be the oldest email I have left.

I wonder what happened to my mail from before...

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

For personal email accounts - when the calendar year ticks over -the entire lot from last year is deleted (any photo's, video clips, etc have already been sorted and saved elsewhere).

For business email accounts - FOREVER - although we usually archive each year for offsite storage - makes it much easier when legal needs something.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

I keep everything forever. As far as I know so does everyone else. I only delete spam and some system generated mails.

My inbox is currently at 14681 mails, my sent box stands at 8101 mails. Some of the people I work with have mailboxes that make mine look tiny.

I'm a bit of a pack rat in real life, which has carried over electronically since to some extent it's even easier there. Certainly with email, I've always archived everything. I have all of my historical email, though at this point only immediate access going back to around 1986. There's also an ~8 year period in the middle while at one job that's a little harder to search than the rest since it only exists as Outlook pst files.

I'm fairly certain I have my earliest email messages as well (going back to circa late 1984) which were in MM on a TOPS-20 system, but suspect they're only archived on a magtape that I'd have to work too hard to read at this point (assuming it was even still readable), so that probably doesn't count.

While admittedly it's quite rare, I've definitely had cases of searching for stuff more than a decade or two old, generally as research for a new project, or coupled with looking for some old code I had written that could be reused.

-- David

I checked gmail and the oldest stuff I have in there is from 1996. A number of years ago, I took what I had in my archive (that had moved from Eudora in the 90s to Thunderbird in the '00s) and just copied it all to gmail. Being able to search it all is pretty useful.

Randomly, some of the earliest emails I have in there are from my mom using email for the first time. They're in all caps, etc. You'd never guess looking at those that she's now an expert and is on her iphone constantly.

Wow. Been online since 1996 and the oldest emails I still have date from 2006. Moved several times and with moving I lost contact with people. Switched providers several times. Took backups, but never bothered to import them and years later decided to delete them. I figured that when you haven't communicated with someone in 5 years you might as well delete emails. I've been using gmail since 2004, but all message before 2007 are deleted. Been using Yahoo mail since turn of the century but have no emails from before 2006.