There are two kinds of e-mail users.

Users who keep their e-mails for a few days or weeks, until they are no longer relevant, and then they delete them.

Then are the other users. You know who you are.

You save every bloody piece of trash that comes into your inbox. You save meeting notes from five years ago. You keep e-mail requests for a piece of inter-office mail. You save everything without even thinking about it. And not just your e-mail...your calendar, too. Every appointment from the day you started as a lowly copy boy is sitting there on the server, just in case you might need it. And now your e-mail file is ten freaking gigabytes in size. And you are yelling at the IT department because your client is crashing trying to download your file.

You, Mr. or Mrs. Save-Every-Piece-of-E-mail-That-I-get, are a freak.

Your excuse for this ridiculous behavior is always, ALWAYS, the same: "I'm just covering my ass." That excuse is lame beyond words. Just because technology makes it possible to save every communique doesn't mean that you should. What did people do before e-mail? Why, they relied on good old word-of-mouth, or, for stuff physically further away than was practical, they used paper. The physical constraints of storing ten years worth of paper meant that archiving was reserved for important documents only. People couldn't save stupid crap from years ago. But wait! Now, through the joy of technology, you can keep records of who said what from aaaages ago. Isn't that what the world needs?

Would you want every word that you said out loud recorded and stored in some vault to be accessed any time there was a question about what you said? Then why do that with e-mail? Is being certain of who said what to whom really that important? I, for one, wouldn't want to work in a place where if I didn't save everything ever sent to me, I'd be liable to get into trouble. It just isn't worth the headache. If you don't work in a place where the people have a little bit of trust in each other, find another place to work.

Exit, stage left. Sparks