Some (Digital) Cleaning

Guess who just found out they have email’s dating back 15 years? Yeah, me. I took some of the little free time I’ve had in the past few days to clean out all of my email archives. I’ve been letting things build up for too long, and am wanting now to take a pro-active role in not just deleting old email but clearing stuff as soon as I’m done with it — a habit which makes perfect sense but I, and so many others, don’t do.

It’s easy to be lazy and just leave email sitting around.. then next thing you know you’re at 30,000 messages just chilling in the inbox. While I’m normally one to have to clear notification and counters when I see them, for some reason with traditional email I’ve never felt the urge.

Well, as I said, I took the time the past few days to clean it all out and it feels pretty damn good to load it up and see just a few simple messages. Something I hadn’t considered and only recently found, thus spawning the opening of this article, is that a particular saved folder in my primary email has messages dating back 10-15 years! Yeah, apparently I saved quite a few bits of mail, mostly related to websites that are now long gone or discussion on various projects back when discussing such via email was still much of a thing people did.

It’s incredible the things you can forget about that you’ve stored on a random server. I’ve found quite a few gems on Xadara over the years (like our old friend drugface.png ) that I had forgotten about, but for the most part this site hasn’t been nearly as bad as my email… and my local storage.

I really should take the time to begin finally nuking all kinds of ancient data on my backup drives. It’s easier to just copy folders over and then clear them off the main machine than it is to curate the data. That will probably be a multiple-week projects off and on, but hell, why not? I’m in a mood to clean up my digital life, and moving on from email it only makes sense I’d hit the main file archives!

More to come, as always.