I’ve been wanting to say that for years, but I knew I wouldn’t completely mean it. Despite how care-free I appear to be (ha!), I still get attached to otherwise useless things, like old e-mail. However, like some kind of organic/mechanical-hybrid species of sentient beings, I have a plan. Two things lead me to this conclusion.
First, I’ve been messing with e-mail a lot lately. A friend found their self in a bind with expired domains and janky customer service, but we finally figured out how to get them all resolving and delivering and other things that e-mail does.
Then I migrated a client from DreamHost hosted e-mail to Google Apps. It wasn’t that bad, but none of the scripts and tools I had used in the past were working, so I ended up doing a lot of manually moving over folders and messages. And dude, do some people love their folders!
The second thing that led me to think about e-mail differently was all the cracked accounts being reported on. The news seems to be loving Anonymous and LulzSec right now. As I am reading those stories, I just keep thinking to myself that this is just the tip of the iceberg, there must be a lot of compromised systems out there. Media personalities make it out like this is war, but it isn’t new. And like the inevitable quotes from IRC channels indicate, they should be happy it is being announced, because most of the time no one knows about this.
Well, I started thinking about it, and realized my e-mail is a liability. Carrying around 5 years of e-mail just means I am making it harder to index, while not giving me any real benefit. If I do search for something, it is unlikely to be from more than couple of weeks old. So I decided to delete it.
Well, that was the plan. But unfortunately I went to the beginning and immediately recoiled. I saw messages to people I hadn’t heard from in years. Threads that made me laugh hard now, just like when I first received them. If I had just done a select all and delete I would have be spared, but I had to go and glance at subject lines…
So, I made a compromise. I went though and did batch searches to delete things like confirmation messages and the like, basically things that I should have deleted back before I knew better. What was left is mainly a set of digital artifacts that are the closest thing I have to letters written that give insight into me and my culture.
Next, I zipped up the Thunderbird profile containing the mail. I encrypted that file, and put it in a couple of safe places.
And then I deleted everything that was older than three months old (because that is actually where my backlog starts, but that is a personal problem that I am working on).
Now I have a reminder on the first of each month to delete anything older than a month. My e-mail archive opens super fast because there are never more than a few hundred messages in it. Most of the important messages (and a lot of personal correspondence) are already encrypted. If somehow my mail is compromised, I will be able to focus on the problem without worrying about the details of having my life posted on the net.
Unless, of course, they already got all my mail. 