D'vorahDavida
Yetzirah

Pawing Through Emails
Thu Apr 15 2004




When we poured some cement quite a while ago, I grabbed Robbie and carefully pressed his paw into the wet cement. I am sure at the time he thought I was behaving very strangely, and perhaps should have given him a doggy cookie instead. But I knew better. As I came back from my walk this morning, I noticed his paw print there in the sidewalk and thought I would share a photo.

[album 65561 Paw Print 2.jpg]

z z z z


After reading CaraSusanetta's entry today where she describes her frenzied attempts to recover what sounds like volumes of old emails that she has been saving on her computer which is having a psychotic break, and having heard from several other people over the years being distressed over the same issue, I have a question.

If you save large quantities of old emails, why do you do it?

No offense intended, but I don't get it. I DO get printing out particularly touching ones or ones from family members, but having a whole lot of them saved on my hard drive never occurs to me. Am I missing something important?

Now to be honest, from time to time it DOES occur to me that we have a huge quantity of correspondence that is evaporating into cyberspace when we delete them. And that it might be very hard for historians in the future to figure out what we were all so enamoured of when we talked about loving to get and send email. But beyond this I still wonder about the desire to save lots of emails.

Do you go back and read them? How do you find the one you want? Do you refer to them often? Aren't you afraid they are incredibly vulnerable to accidental loss (the very nature of computerdom?

So I am ready to be educated. And heck, I might even change my ways if you email savers explain what I might be missing by being so cavalier with my "Delete" button.

I'm all email ears !



9 Comments
  • From:
    CaraSusanetta (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Apr 14 2004
    Bookman needs his electronic memory. He keeps his business correspondence in our account as well his political and personal emails. It's how he keeps track of people's electronic addresses among other things. Me, I don't generally do that, although I do keep some of the email addresses there. It's not the volume that his is. I can easily transfer mine to paper if necessary. For him it would be a time consuming and painful experience. Since I'm the Chief Technology Officer of the family, it's my "job" to handle these annoying complications, so I have the painful and time consuming aspect of things. A deft bit of task rearranging with no actual time savings. I do it out of love, and also out of avoiding the inevitable sighs of despair. I lost old emails once and learned my lesson...
  • From:
    Salamander (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Apr 14 2004
    Why I save emails.
    By Salamander

    I have saved emails ever since I figured out how to separate them and organize them in different files in Outlook Express. The reason I do so depends on the source of the email.

    - I have every email The Socialist ever sent me. Call me sentimental, but I can't bring myself to delete any of it.

    - I do a fair amount of on-line purchasing. By saving the emails in my "shopping" file, I have a good history of purchases I made, how happy I was with the service, and handy links to find places I previously purchased from.

    - I do banking on-line as well. Receipts, confirmations, other related email go in that file, so that if something goes wrong I have proof of transaction.

    - Letter from friends - Addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, plans, I wish I had's, are all saved in individual files. When Dr. Twenty Cat's birthday comes up in September, I have only to go to her email file and review the correspondence of the last year to get birthday present ideas for her.

    Memberships - When you join an online site, confirmation of your password is usually emailed to you. My membership file serves as a reservoir for these passwords, in case I ever have a "senior moment" and my brain refuses to engage and disgorge the needed password.

    I do delete much mail after it's served its use, but even after deleting notifies and newsletters and jokes I still have a fair amount of mail saved. It's no diffrent than snail mail, much of which gets saved as well.
  • From:
    Angelnut (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Apr 14 2004
    I don't save much email, but what I do save are usually meaningful ones from family or friends or jokes. The funny ones I keep because they get added to our family website eventually (we have a "Funny File" page). Like Salamander, I keep online purchase confirmations (but only until I have received the order) and membership account info. I also keep email correspondence from people I have met doing genealogy research (mostly because I get confused about who I got what from if I don't). I use a yahoo account, so I NEVER have to worry about losing my emails, but I have limited storage space, so I have to clean it out pretty regularly, and that means I only save the really good ones!
  • From:
    Yarngirl (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    Sweet puppy paw...

    I usually save emails thinking I'll refer back to them at some point in the future. I rarely do and eventually they get deleted. I do, however, have several diskettes of emails that Rick and I sent to each other before he moved here from California. I read them sometimes too.

    Can you read pdf files? If you can't let me know - I found a hdc pattern for you -

    http://www.freepatterns.com/fp_pdfs/2002/12-02cardigan.pdf

    Julie
  • From:
    Dustbunny3 (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    Foot prints cast in stone better than my foot prints is the sand. Floods of good times return.
    Cold and WINDY Rain/Snow for next few days.
  • From:
    Pragmatist (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    I've created a bunch of folders to save stuff that I want to save. Is that the same as saving to the hard drive? Ummm....no, I don't think so. Anyway, I save the really GOOD stuff.

    The next time I write, I'll be in Illinois!

    Hot dog!!!!!

    Shalom
  • From:
    Sezrah (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    yikes, i definitely don't save my emails and delete them now and again all at once

  • From:
    Bookworm (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    Um, yeah, I don't get it either. ;-)
  • From:
    MagicWhiskey (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Apr 15 2004
    I save e-mails for the same reason I save those Bazooka gum wrappers with the comic strip inside, because I can. Besides those ridiculous subject lines about adding three inches to my love muscle give me a good chuckle when I look through my Inbox.

    Say, is Robbie in possession of very long nails?