How I Do Email: Revisited

2022-09-01

1 min read

How I Do Things

I wrote about how I moved away from GMail last year, so I wanted to revisit the efficacy of the setup.g

So this data is from mid-February 2021 to September 1, 2022.

To revisit, I file email into folders. Levels 1, 2, and 3 are kept indefinitely, level 4 is kept for a year, and level 5 (the default) is kept for a month. I have received 55,941 emails since the start of this account. The current counts are:

Level 1 - Critical: 711 emails
Level 2 - Interesting Now: 792 emails
Level 3 - Routine: 6,277 emails
Level 4 - Interesting Later: 4,784 emails
Level 5 - Never Interesting: 3,925 emails

So in sum, 7,780 emails are in a state where they won’t ever be deleted, which is a retention rate of 13.9%. That means that 86% of my email will eventually be deleted unless I choose to rescue it.

And after 18 months, the storage is 5% full - using 2560 MB of 53687 MB of quota. And the only maintenance I do is an occasional scan of the level 5 emails to see if anything has missed the filters. I spend almost no time tending to it, so the ratio of reading email to managing email is almost 100%.