Email takes up very little space, so you should save
all of your email.
You can delete any email that you really don't want, usually by selecting
it and pressing the Del key. However, in general, you should never
delete an email. Once an email is
deleted you can never retrieve it, but today's computers have so much disk space
that you should be able to file and save your messages forever. Taking
conservative figures, if you received 10 emails a day, on average
each a full 2000 characters (bytes) in size, it would take 137 years
of continuous use to fill up a one gigabyte disk.
1,000,000,000 / ( 365 * 10 * 2000 ) = 137
Your actual email requirements will likely use up less space. Attachments
are stored in separate folders, and don't count against your email
message storage
space.
Every rule of thumb has an exception: one good reason you might want
to delete a message would be if you sent a very long message,
like a 100 page text file (perhaps a newsletter or business
document) inline to the actual body of an email to several people, taking up
several hundred kilobytes of mailbox space all at once. In this case,
you might want to
arrange it so that you can keep your personal email text sent to each person,
but delete the longer message, as follows:
- First, send people an email that says hi and tells them that you
are about to send them a longer message in the next email, tells
them what the message is about, etc.
- Then
send them a second email with the actual newsletter or other long document.
- Then delete the second email with the long message from your Outbox, keeping
the first email.
This approach
is useful to the recipients as well, since they may want to copy the longer message text into a word processing document and then delete your second email, but keep your first email with your greeting and other information.
There have also been some efforts at creating self-deleting email, by use
of email expires
headers and through use of email
encryption, but they have not so far gained widespread use.
