Archiving mail, whats that?

…If that’s your answer to whether you archive your mail? (like me) or even if you did know what it is, but never cared to do so. Gmail blog, has come up with 9 reasons as to why you should archive your mail. Cut the crap out! What’s archiving? It just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. (Thanks to gmail blog for that short and simple definition!). So why should you do that? Here is why:

9. Phone numbers and addresses
You never know when you'll need a phone number someone emailed you or an address that was in a signature.

8. Procrastination
Sometimes you want to get a message out of your inbox, but you don't want to deal with organization, and you don't want to trash it.

7. Posterity
Just because you’re not famous now doesn’t mean that in forty years (or fifteen minutes) you won’t want to write your memoir.

6. Winning arguments
“But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….”

5. Mailing lists
Do you really need to know what Clintobamccain is doing every day? Auto-archive* their messages until you want to donate again.

4. Birthdays
Search for “grandma birthday” and voila, find the message you sent her last April. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted?

3. That guy
Remember that guy you thought you’d never need to get in touch with ever again?

2. Because you can
May as well use the free storage space. Plus, clean inbox = clean mind.

1. Fate-tempting is bad. You just never know
Thirty-one days after you send that message to the Trash and it gets permanently deleted, you're going to need it. Don't tempt the fates.

*To auto-archive, create a filter with the action "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)."

Reasons 9, 6 & 1 are something that I can really relate too. If not for anything you should give reason 7 a serious thought!

Why bother?


Some are confused as to why they should even bother to archive their mails, when Google offers you virtually unlimited space. If you ask me I can give you 2 reasons:

1. If you are one of those persons, who receive a lot of mails (which haven’t been attended to) which makes your inbox look really cluttered and drives you so mad, that it makes you feel that you rather sign out or delete them. Then, archiving helps you to keep you inbox clean. And also if you use labels, it is just repetitive to have your mails shown in the inbox too.



2. The next one is the most unlikely of the reasons. If you get so much mail that your (ever increasing) storage is almost full and you don’t want to delete the mails (I can’t figure out how that can be done!), you can make use of archiving and take full advantage of google’s free storage rather than deleting it.

Happy Gmailing!