Deleting Emails

Such a dull title. I’ve used to have a system or tried to have a system to manage my inbox, but then I saw a friend of mine who had 10,000+ notifications on the Gmail app icon, I started to relax. I am not that bad, I thought. I also removed the number on the app icon, so I don’t see how many emails I have that I don’t read.

Then Google added the function automatic sorting, where promotions and socials, which are the most spammy stuff, had their own tab, I stopped sorting things altogether. I just made sure the emails in Primary tab is read and dealt with, and all’s good. Recently however my storage quota is getting almost full, so I had to delete and sorted some of the emails. I thought to myself if I am not reading this email from years ago, what would I miss if I delete them? So I began a bit of spring cleaning.

There is still a slight friction in this process as before I deleted a group of emails that I filtered (mostly “label:unread”), I scanned through some of the titles, and some managed to make me click them. That caused me to wonder, what about the others that I am not clicking through? They might have something important that their title didn’t show, right?

As I second guess myself, I wonder what would this matter? Even if let’s say in the future I require certain information that was sent to me by email but I didn’t read, I’ll just assume it didn’t arrive. Or it might even be that after deleting all those emails, Google probably backs them all up somewhere, maybe just a copy of each spammy newsletter, with a table correlating to whom it was sent too. Maybe.

Thank you for reading.