Any actual two way communication with another human absolutely gets archived. I love myself an audit trail. It's saved my ass more than once.

Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad

(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)

>Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future

Basically what I do, but the problem for a certain type of mind is that "might be useful" is a pretty broad category to fall down. "Years and years of Perl mailing lists in case I want to search them instead of SE/PerlMonks/etc." Yeah, in theory. "Any newsletter I haven't ever read?" I mean, in theory I might search for something from 2011. "ThinkGeek purchases from back in the day?" Yes, definitely! So, in practice, just archive, and let your search results be polluted by daily newsletters.

Still, I try and keep Merlin Mann's Wisdom advice in mind:

>Organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.

That being said, though, there's a line that only becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on: family and friends >>> everything else. I'd take a relative's email I didn't want to reply to when I was in college over pretty much anything. Do whatever you need to do to keep that.

1. Receipts, bill, utilities, etc. (Sublabel for every company)

2. Friends&Family (Sublabel for every person)

3. School and school related (Sublabel for every person)

4. Government and government related (Sublabel by organization)

5. Random and miscellaneous

It's archive, but somewhat organized

Delete: Everything

I also maintain an always zero inbox and everything is neatly classified thanks to the power of automation.

My inbox is (1) things I need to read (2) a big searchable archive of things I might need later. Nothing more, and certainly not my to-do list. So I don't feel the need to do anything more than I'm doing.

The most important thing is not what to do with emails in your inbox, but figuring out what should go in the inbox to begin with.

I have a whitelist. Anything not in the whitelist goes into "quarantine". I give some details here:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...

HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807

Once we take care of the bulk of emails that way, it's easier making decisions on the items in the inbox. I usually delete if it's some automated email (e.g. calendar reminder, etc). I archive if it's personal or may have some useful information I want to refer to later (e.g. notification that my electricity bill was paid).

But I lie. Even when I "delete", I don't delete. I merely tag it as "deleted". It's always there on my hard drive. Normally when I do a search, I have to specify "and not tag:deleted".

And those quarantined emails? I neither delete nor archive. They just stay there with the "quarantine" tag.

I'd like to have a retain-for-one-year button, to move things out of my inbox, but not keep them perpetually. I'd rarely delete immediately, and I'd seldom archive for eternity.

I have partial/spotty archives going back to the early 90s, which then turn into a full archive starting in 2004. It's not often but there are plenty of times where it's been useful to be able to dig up some nugget from 20-30 years ago to answer a question. And also, sometimes it's just fun to go on a nostalgia trip

But I personally do not like email as a system of record. My response to 'what if I need to know something about the tires' is that I keep a spreadsheet with everything I do to my car.