Comments on: Gmail: 9 reasons not to archive messages

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:20:40 +0000

@naxa - Let’s say Google does keep my emails forever even after I delete them. However, once I delete them, they can’t be accessed from my account - so no chance of someone finding out about my old emails if they got hold of my account (for example, my wife can’t read about my ex-girlfriends if I left my gmail open at home some day).

The point that I am making is that you should delete if you don’t have a good reason to keep.

By: naxa

naxa — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:16:42 +0000

Isn’t google stating in Terms that they WON’T delete mails automatically from their servers EVEN if you delete them?
In other words they could keep them forever if they want.
I am very positive that I’ve read this in terms.

And I think they’re actually making money of more and more mails. This is a massive database. In these times, databases are the most expensive and often unreproductable things. They won’t read it, but they allow their robots to read it - this is how they can give you the adds on the side of the page.

But the more clever robot they produce, the more information they can use legally and for free. They can create and sell online shopping habits for example. Or sell information like “how many emails are containing the term ‘motorola’ these days?” for example. Clever robots perhaps could make very useful, anonymous statistics for companies about people’s habits. This way google could enjoy the pros of being a legal and accepted big brother. Their workers don’t know a word about you personally - but they could sell or use databases of any kind based on millions of people’s emailing habits and information provided by their robots. I don’t know if they’re doing this or not, but they could.

By: ikoko

ikoko — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:23:35 +0000

thanks vaibhav for presenting us a good reason of not keep the old email .

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:43:18 +0000

@quack, well that is why I suggest a mixed course of action.

You delete and then you forget….

By: quack

quack — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:31:38 +0000

“What if you changed your mind?”

ok, now change the perspective… if you are the type that always delete emails, you will go crazy trying and will NEVER read your deleted emails again.

By: digitalpbk

digitalpbk — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:49:22 +0000

Phew..
Well noone really knows, if its all for good or ….

By: Habitually Good » Blog Archive » It’s raining traffic around here

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:07:01 +0000

[...] a look at my Google Analytics visitor graph for this blog. That is yesterday. I posted this reply to a post on the Gmail blog and that resulted in this traffic [...]

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:46:13 +0000

@joe…

well, ok, i give in… but i still say archiving all is not the right way (as Google says)

By: joe

joe — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:44:37 +0000

Well Vaibhav… Owen is right. If they wanted to keep more data they would. They don’t have to convince the user not to use the delete function. …nooob

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:42:37 +0000

@Owen - yes, that is true. But it may be reasonable to assume that they may not preserve all the information that gets deleted.

@KC - yup, that is what I kind of meant when I said “Some email is not meant to be saved”…

By: KC

KC — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:19:55 +0000

You missed the number 1 reason not to archive an email message: Litigation

If you are ever sued (either personnally or via involvement with an activity at work) and your personal email become discoverable (which it ALWAYS does) then all 6 Gig of crap that you have ever stored anywhere will instantly fall into the hands of someone you don’t love, trust or ever want to talk to.

Far fetched you say? Guess again. Millions of Americans are involved in lawsuits each year. Electronic discovery is a multi-billion dollar business - read up on a law firm called K. L. Gates and you will begin to understand. I work on the defense side of this business, and believe me, no one is safe from the Vampi…I mean lawyers. Archive at your own perril!

By: Owen

Owen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:42:43 +0000

Gmail’s Terms and Conditions document specifies that “Google also reserves the right to … preserve … any information …” and then goes on to list a whole bunch of things that it can use that information for.
Essentially, this means that deleting an email only affects _your_ access to it, Google can (probably) still get at it if they really want to. This renders reasons 1, 3 and 4 obsolete.
As mentioned above, a combination of deleting and archiving is probably the way to go.

By: Do you archive? at diversity.net.nz

Do you archive? at diversity.net.nz — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:21:39 +0000

[...] posted this saying that it was a mistake for Gmail users to automatically hit the archive button instead of [...]

By: Shailendra

Shailendra — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:08:57 +0000

Hi Vaibhav,

Thanks for writing the downside of archiving emails. I like the #1,#2 and #5. Labeling (only) imp emails will be better.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:21:52 +0000

@Eireann
main theek hun

well in the interest of maintaining fairness, I am sure that Google wasn’t trying to advocate that you should never delete emails. They were just trying to draw attention to the archive feature.

I just wanted to point out that I shouldn’t want to archive everything.

@Subhas - thanks for your comments… and yes, Google just wants more and more people to use their service. that’s all.