Essentially, saving emails is a way of deluding themselves into thinking they'll get around to addressing them all. Rutledge also posits that deleting emails feels too risky for savers. "Some people save read emails for the sense of security it gives to believe they could find stuff if they needed to," she says.
Deleting removes emails from your inbox. It does save up space, but you won't be able to ever again access your emails. This puts you at risk both in financial and legal terms. You won't be able to produce evidence for ediscovery and litigation.
Leaving emails unread can signify that you're overwhelmed or disengaged. It can mean that you recognize that organizing those emails isn't helping you achieve progress. Email reflects other people's priorities for you, not necessarily important work that requires your immediate attention.
Should you delete old emails? Yes, it will free space for new important messages, attachments, and files. Deleting old messages will also help keep your inbox clean and organized.
There are a couple of reasons why someone might intentionally keep an email “unread.” Most commonly, they intend to read it later and don't want to forget about it. This is essentially using unread emails as a to-do list of sorts. The other main reason is simply ignoring the email.
The more emails we send and receive, the more energy is required to store and transmit them. This is why deleting emails can help reduce the energy and resources needed to run the internet and lower your carbon footprint.
The Average Person Has 1,602 Unread Emails!
Email archiving is the process of securely storing emails, making it easy to search for and retrieve them. It's a fast, reliable, and scalable solution to storing essential emails while reducing the load on mail servers. It helps store old emails that you don't need immediate access to, but don't want to delete.
Archiving emails is usually the better option
Deleting emails can lead to data loss and make it more difficult to retrieve information down the line. If you are looking for a way to declutter your inbox, try archiving old messages instead of hitting the delete button.
Email retention periods vary considerably for different data types. Most federal and state email retention laws require email data to be retained for between 3 and 7 years, although there are exceptions and certain types of data may have do be retained for much longer, even indefinitely.
They're overwhelmed with too many emails.
And in a survey of 500 people, 56% receive 25 to 49 emails a day, but 74% open and read 10 or fewer emails. That means these folks are getting 15 to 39 emails every day that they don't even read, simply because of email fatigue.
While you may know, rationally, that there are plenty of good reasons for someone not to respond to a text or an email—they're busy, they haven't seen the message yet, they're thinking about what they want to say—it doesn't always feel that way in a society where everyone seems to be on their smartphone all the time.
Being left unopened is the worst. It's like the person didn't bother checking what you wrote to them. Being left on read tells you they were curious enough to read what you wrote but they ignored to reply back. Honestly, both are bad but when you think about being left undelivered it's wayyy worse.
Psychologists say the way you clean (or don't clean) your inbox actually does say something about your personality. Those who delete quickly and efficiently might be control freaks, while those with 1,000 unread emails may not be as unorganized as you'd think.
When you delete email messages (and empty your “Trash” folder), it may seem like there's no way to get that data back, but that isn't entirely true. The good news here is that for the most part, hackers can't access emails that are deleted permanently from the Trash folder.
Yet, deleting an email is not illegal. Instead, it will provide a ground for the employer to dismiss or terminate that employee. Furthermore, cases before the Fair Work Commission has seen copyright claims weaved into issues concerning the use of work emails.
Email archiving allows you to keep a record of everything sent and received, ensuring that you always have a copy of your messages and any documents attached. By archiving your important data and documents, they're stored safely in a separate folder—meaning there's less chance you'll delete or lose them.
When you delete a message, it stays in your trash for 30 days. After that time, it will be permanently deleted from your account and can't be recovered.
The key reason to archive your documents is to avoid losing data. All documents are vulnerable to being destroyed or corrupted (if digital), either maliciously, by accident, or by a natural disaster, such as a flood or fire.
Messages you archived aren't deleted, and you can find them any time.
Archiving provides a guarantee that all relevant business conversations are recorded as required, whether or not one party deletes the chat, individual messages, or their profile.
Longer emails are less likely to be read and less likely to be read carefully. Craig goes on to say, “Writing long emails doesn't mean you are getting more work done.” Many people hold this weird misconception that there's value in length, as if saying more equates to doing more.
Set up a temporary folder for all those unread emails.
The goal is not to throw all of that back email away, but to get it out of the inbox and know what a clean inbox feels like. Set deadlines to slog through the folder of back email. At the same time, ensure your clean new inbox is empty at the end of each day.