Today I forwarded an email I originally sent in 2005 back to a mailing list my wife and I are on.

Wife: You still had an email you sent back in 2005?

Me: I don’t delete any of my emails.

Wife: Why not?

Me: You never know when you will need them.

Wife: You’re insane.

Me: This is proof! If I had deleted that email, I wouldn’t have had it to send to the mailing list today.

**

Note:

I do delete some email that get sent to me.

And I have deleted emails I have sent to myself between email accounts containing very large attachments. I only need the backups of those files in one email account.

But other than that, I have never deleted any email from my sent folder since opening my Gmail account in June of 2004.

Currently, in my primary email account, my sent folder contains 13,027 email conversations, and the whole account contains 129,647 conversations.

Sure, I could delete some of that.

However, I’m only using 56% of the space available. Why should I?

Who knows what email I will want to refer back to 9 years from now?