📅 06 Nov 2025 | ⏱️ ~2 minute read
When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I’d add my approach to the pile.
When it comes to email, I’m extremely anal. I’m a zero inbox kinda guy - my inbox is a place for emails to temporarily live before I deal with them. Once they’re dealt with, they either get archived or deleted.
Right now I have 5 emails in my personal mailbox, and 7 in my work email. I treat it as a kind of living to-do list. I get tonnes of email, especially in work (hundreds a day), so to anyone who says they get too much email to do inbox zero, I call bullshit.
Any…
📅 06 Nov 2025 | ⏱️ ~2 minute read
When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I’d add my approach to the pile.
When it comes to email, I’m extremely anal. I’m a zero inbox kinda guy - my inbox is a place for emails to temporarily live before I deal with them. Once they’re dealt with, they either get archived or deleted.
Right now I have 5 emails in my personal mailbox, and 7 in my work email. I treat it as a kind of living to-do list. I get tonnes of email, especially in work (hundreds a day), so to anyone who says they get too much email to do inbox zero, I call bullshit.
Anyway, I digress, this post isn’t about my love of zero inbox. That’s a post for another day. After reading Chris’ post, I dropped him an email with my thoughts, but I decided to write them out here too.
Personally, I do a combination of both. I probably delete around half of the email I receive, but for the other half, I do one of two things:
- Archive it.
- Move it to my Keep folder.
Long-term solution
I have a clean up of my mailbox at the end of every year. Everything in my sent items and archives get moved to a sub-folder by year, then the oldest year gets deleted. I only keep 3 years of mail in my mailbox.
The exception to this is my Keep folder. Stuff in there is considered important and kept indefinitely.
I host my email with Zoho, where I get 5GB of storage space. Some people think that’s not a lot, considering you get 3x that with a free Gmail account. But 5GB is an absolute shit-tonne of storage when you consider that emails are basically text with the odd attachment.
With my 3 year archive, and decades of important email in my Keep folder, I’m currently using 1.19GB of the space that comes with my mailbox.
Sorry, I went off on another tangent there…clearly I’m very passionate about email and should probably write more posts about it. Maybe I should start a blog dedicated to email, just like Chris did! 🤔
So that’s my approach to archive vs deletion, what do you do? I hope you’re not one of those heathens who has tens of thousands of unread email in your inbox? If so, I’m not sure we can be friends.
[✉️ Reply by email ](mailto:72ja@qrk.one?subject=Reply to: Archive or Delete?)
When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I’d add my approach to the pile.