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).
People don't always follow categories like that. I have quite a few addresses, but he sent it to the one he remembered to type in and hoped I got it. I did, but didn't keep it.
My policy is never to reveal my work email to anyone other than coworkers and business partners. I have changed jobs before and it is always a mess to get rid of a job-related email accounts.
Another way to handle this is to forward all your work email to another service, then if you change jobs that email simply stops, but you still have all the history and any personal messages that might have gotten sent to that address.
I know a few people who don't like using Outlook so they set up their work email to autoforward to gmail and use that to handle their email.
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).