Why don't you just
throw it out already?
A megabyte of mail, even in our present day and age of rich text mail, can go
a long way. Just what sort of mail am I saving? There are, of course, personal
messages (which I might actually like to see again) but there are also many too
many messages from the numerous listservs I've been on through the years. I trust
that any of these that are really interesting have been archived somewhere and
are rather readily accessible, but even when I make an effort to throw things
out I find myself saving much too much. It's hard to decide which is worse: saving
materials of this sort on paper until they clutter up the house and Tzippi demands
that I get rid of it all already, or saving it in digital bits where ostensibly
it doesn't bother anyone, until I start getting system messages that there's not
enough space available on the computer, and it starts crashing as a result. I
have one 100MB Zip-disk which is almost full with about a year and a half of correspondence
of one mailing list that I was on only as an observer from the sidelines. I think
I can safely erase it already, but who knows when I might want to use it. It's
wonderful material for some sort of study. Come to think of it, if anybody wants
it, let
me know.
Go to: When it rains, it pours, or
Go to: The Promise of Ubiquitous Access.