After spending an hour trying to clean up my unread message count, I realized I’m on far too many lists. This never used to be an issue a few years ago, because the lists I was on were critical to a lot of stuff I did. For example, TheBat user discussion list. I used to be very active in the client, as well as helping out a lot. It’s served me well for over 5 years, though there have been some rough spots, and nearly complete give-ups, but always attracted back to it because of its rich features. The problem is, my work now doesn’t give me enough time to read a huge amount of emails, and the last thing I feel like doing at the end of the day is trawling through a few hundred emails about helping people when I’ve been doing it all day. Then there is the undernet stuff, and various other lists too.
So I was looking at my mail store size. About a year ago, I started “archiving” stuff by creating an archive structure duplicating the folder layout, and moving emails into a dated folder under that. Then I bzip2’d a few years worth of stuff, took them off the box, and left it at that. Well, despite doing that, I still have close to 2GB of mail. I am sitting here in a moment of thought, trying to work out why I have 2GB of mail. Originally I had planned to keep some of it for references, but then I think back to the last time I even looked at the archives. Quite simply, I have not. So that tells me it’s clean up time. My plan is fairly simple, bzip2 everything that is dated before 2005, take it off the server, burn it to a DVD, and store it. If I ever decide later at some point in time I had an article I know I’d read waaay back in time, I know I have it, otherwise it doesn’t need to be on my server.
The “clean mail store” will only contain information I know I will need frequently, or are things I have to deal with. For example, SquirrelMail bugs, or reply to friends, otherwise it’s going to be a case of read and delete. I should probably also consider a better storage method for my license keys, and serial numbers instead of my mailbox. I think this will probably help me start to unclutter some things around here… now off to say some goodbyes on some lists, and do some unsubscribing.