The unexpected emotional rollercoaster of deleting old email
I had taken immense pride in storing and categorizing years of email, both personal and professional. I had gone down the rabbit hole of creating filter rules, thoroughly testing them, creating folders and sub-folders, etc. Usually, I'd have a generic inbox from where I would sift and put away, even cron/system emails that I didn't need to keep; it is very helpful though to be able to refer to a system event based upon timestamps of email, etc. Given the rise of cloud email, at least in a professional setting, it always nagged me that those emails are available, despite having been read by who knows, or worse, given to some LLM as training data.
I ventured online in the POP era, which means once the message is downloaded by an email client, it is _removed_ from the server. There are pros and cons to this method, the obvious being if you have more than one mail client, there is HIGH probability that you'll have "missing" messages, UNLESS your client supported the feature "leave a copy of the message on the server". Enter IMAP, so many settings, but in a nutshell your email would remain on the server, "forever". I enjoyed knowing that something could trigger a memory, and I could then find the email and "download" it. Over time, as more and more email was received and more and more clients were installed, the sheer amount of email became somewhat frustrating while syncing a client. One would have to choose how many days the client should look back to download messages, or should only the headers be downloaded, etc. Often times, the delay would be super annoying - knowing that your message is there. And look, I know there are workarounds for this scenario, BUT, I am talking about me here; my capsule, my rants!!!
I had read some post in the last month or two discussing email, and how it should be a priority to make sure the inbox is as tidy as it needs to be. This led me to finally realize that, I probably don't need to re-read an email from 5 years ago, and that I don't need to look at cron notices from 10 years ago, or Zabbix alerts from 2 weeks ago, etc. I also realized that due to conferences I occasionally attend, that I get a lot of psuedo SPAM. I desperately wanted my inbox back and my client lean, and at the same time I did not want to do anything about it other than to complain.
I said "fuck it" two days ago and started deleting tons of old email (I mean it's already been saved in some huge storage farm, right?), even starting the process of deleting emails that I clearly don't need to save! It has been such a cathartic experience, like some invisible chain has been removed, or that lingering annoyance of how long it takes to check and sync my inbox upon startup, etc. It's an awesome experience, especially for an ADHD'er - these minor annoyances or "nothing burgers" to other people can be devastating for people like me.