As you said, it’s only the information you need, so finding a way to archive it is important, but you don’t always know what will be important 6 months from now. Really, it’s the attachments that take up most the space – detaching them will make a big difference.

Google Mail is good , but not great, in my opinion – I still think it has some work to do on the interface. Filters are ok, I do like the thread view. Want to see something cool? Launch Thunderbird and highlight several emails. In the preview pane, you’ll see a summary of all those emails, along with some new options. Or, if you have multiple accounts, like I do, your inbox is now a combined inbox, or you can view just emails from a certain account. Search results are organized very well, too. The key thing for GMail is that it is an IMAP account, so you can use any client to view. Whether you download to your desktop (or phone) is up to you.

Email retention is becoming a major topic at work – we’ll be instituting a 28-day retention for all emails! I have stuff going back 5 years, and I often refer back to threads from a year ago. I still don’t have a good practice for identifying and saving important threads, but I am finding it to be a discipline I have to follow.

Just my two cents

- Nicolas