However, what I had neglected to do was to properly investigate my "Sent Items" and do some brutal felling in that particular forest.
I have had a Hotmail account since 2007 and today I discovered I had over a thousand "Sent Items" in accessible storage - some of them with images or documents attached. By getting rid of the majority of these I will be bound to free up storage capacity but that is more easily said than done.
Those e-mails go back nineteen years and document moments in my personal history. It is not going to be as easy to delete them as I first imagined.
There are e-mails about our Frances starting university, around the deaths of Shirley's mother, my mother, my two late brothers. E-mails sent from India, Thailand and Easter Island, e-mails that speak of my increasing disgruntlement with teaching before I retired. E-mails about house buying and selling and so on and so forth.
"Thanks for this. Brings back lots of memories. So long ago now!"
To me 2007 does not really seem "so long ago now" but when I stop and think, I was just a young lad of 53 back then. In many ways the world was a different place. Apple i-phones had only just come on the market and very few people had them until 2010. It was the year in which Britain's Labour PM Tony Blair was replaced by Gordon Brown and the best selling album in Great Britain was Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black". Manchester United won The Premier League and over in America mentally ill Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people dead at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
I guess that I am more drawn to hoarding than to minimalism and in that sense I already find the prospect of wading through all those "Sent Items" with an axe quite daunting but as I said before, I do not need to do the culling in one go. Step by step. "That's the way to do it!" as Punch said to Judy.
The phrase I remember from Punch and Judy is "there's plenty more where that one came from."
ReplyDeleteWhen I my gmail account along with my blog, I thought it was quite tragic to lose all the emails going back quite a few years, yet I haven't once missed them, unlike my blog.
ReplyDeleteI clear my "sent" items daily, none are so important that they need keeping. I clear the "spam" daily too. Can you print and keep in a folder the most important ones and delete the rest? Or just make a folder in your "documents" on the desktop or laptop, label it "important sent", then copy paste each one into that, add the date and subject, and delete the rest.
ReplyDeleteAm I the only one who finds Punch and Judy disturbing? Also, she is much too close to home for me with her blue eyes, red nose and large, unsightly teeth.
ReplyDeleteBack to topic: My hotmail account was set up in 2001. The settings are so that everything in the junk/spam folder will automatically be deleted after 30 days. I regularly cull my inbox and my sent items, just like I do with my work-related emails. Important stuff is divided into folders such as tax-related mails, travel information about our UK trips, hotel booking confirmations for O.K. and my holidays and so on, but once those holidays/trips are over, there is no need for me to keep the confirmations, train itineraries and so on.
Like you say, a lot of what is in our email accounts is personal history and worth keeping, but it can always be stored somewhere else, it doesn't have to take up space in the account.
I do
DeleteI noticed recently that I had several thousand unread Emails, and I deleted them all. I'm sure I haven't missed anything.
ReplyDeleteOh dear. I always forget to tidy out my Sent items. I dread to think how many emails are festering in there right now.
ReplyDeleteDoes Hotmail even still exist?? This post made me recall that I did have a hotmail account once upon a time, but I think not used in the last 20 years at least... Found a note about the address I used to use, and tried to log in now, but was met by a Microsoft message telling me that "Hotmail is now Outlook.com". Followed instructions from there and was able to log in but all I found was six spam messages and nothing from the past. (I think I probably closed the account many years ago, including erasing all content...)
ReplyDeleteI keep getting reminders on my smartphone to delete stuff as my storage is full but even though I've deleted a lot of photos and other things it still keeps reminding me, so I am hard pushed to know what else I can remove . I think I need a new phone with better storage.
ReplyDeleteHere's something that helps me cull- I realize that if I hadn't started going back to try and get rid of things, I'd never remember those things were there in the first place so really- what good are they doing? These things happened. Their moment has passed.
ReplyDeleteLet 'em go.
At least that's what helps me.
I'm very good at "thinning the herd".
ReplyDeleteI'd say Meike knows best, Neil.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny your account still worked. I had a friend who I couldn't email. His account was full.
ReplyDeleteIt's like cleaning up dog shit, you don't have to clean the whole yard in one go:)
ReplyDeleteI tend to delete things too quickly and have regretted it sometimes but not much. When I had to go through all of my posts to censor myself, I kept a lot of my old posts on my computer, but when I thought about it, I didn't want to keep all of those old memories any more and deleted them. Maybe dementia is a form of grace for us as we age.
To answer Meike's question...I also find Punch and Judy disturbing. They're so ugly and creepy!
ReplyDeleteI've had my AOL e-mail account since 1995, and I don't think I've ever deliberately deleted old or sent messages (except spam or junk I never wanted). If I remember correctly, messages used to expire of their own accord after several months or a year or two. Eventually they stopped expiring and just stacked up. I now have incoming e-mail going back to January 2009, and sent e-mail from December 2009. I never look at any of it, but it's good to know it's there if I ever want to look up something.
ReplyDeleteI’ve been locked out of my Hotmail account for 2 years
ReplyDelete