Archive?
18 04 2008Gmail’s “9 reasons to press the archive button” successfully makes the case for archiving rather than deleting, but I’m still confused as to how it makes more sense than, say, leaving the mails in your inbox. I can’t be the only person who doesn’t archive every mail after I’ve read it, can I? And, let’s be honest, if you need to run a blog post to tell your users that they should be using a feature, maybe it’s not them who need correcting…
I completely agree with this. I never realized why people would want to archive their mail, when they can just leave it there (and not delete it). The only thing I could imagine is for highly organized people that label and re-label their mail, then archive it so they can easily find it later, while keeping their inbox looking tidy. I get so much mail I can’t deal with it though, so I just leave it in the inbox.
Even I’m also keeping all my mails in INBOX. Archival may be helpful to google .I Guess, they compress all archived mails.
Considering that Gmail allows for virtually unlimited storage, I too have never seen the benefit of archiving. I have e-mails that date back to January 2005 in my Gmail inbox, and the thought of archiving them has never crossed my mind. I’m sure archiving is useful, but the Gmail blog post didn’t really convince me that it was preferable to leaving old messages in my inbox.
I’m wondering if it saves processing time not having to load a huge inbox of emails. If you only have to load a few and the rest are in the archive that might help performance?
Not sure, but there’s got to be a better reason than the 9 they give.
Er, yeah, not sure I understand this. GMail was founded on the idea of never deleting emails, and its supremely powerful search facility (and general speed at browsing through pages and pages of old mails) and near-limitless storage capacity make this easy. I don’t understand why they’re now saying it would be better to dump everything in a separate archive - surely it would still then be a Big Unwieldy Folder that you’d have to navigate?
And surely NO-ONE who uses GMail actually deletes mails from their inbox… do they?
I’m not sure I understand why I would need to Archive… they’ve given 9 reasons, but the fact is I don’t delete my e-mails - I’m in the habit of saving everything so I can search back on it. Is it that Google sees a significant set of users deleting e-mails? Is this the group to whom their post is addressed?
I was a bit bewildered at their post. Hmm.
Mungo Says Bah!
Yeah I do not get it either…
I don’t know… I find archiving useful. I used to also think it was pointless as we don’t have to delete anything, everything can just remain where it is. Over time I found it helpful to ‘get rid’ of messages that I was done ‘dealing with’ but may need in the future. I tend to archive when say a ‘conversation’ is over, an issue has been resolved, an event took place…. things like that. It’s nice to put it in the back(but not completely deleted) and check your inbox to see only current, relevant things that you may need to deal with.
As someone who likes to restrict her inbox to current mail, I will reluctantly use the archiving function. But I’d much rather have folders that I can label myself. Why? For the same reasons I drive a car with a standard shift: because I want to make the decisions, not have some automaton do it for me. Just my way of resisting “The Machine”
I agree with Christine that we would rather have more folders or label option for better organisation than to keep everything away in another warehouse but the stuff are still in a mess.
I agree with Christine also. I would much rather make my own folders to organize things I would like to keep than just archive them in yet another mess of emails and have to search for that specific email. Where as if it’s in that folder I know where it is in my own way of organizing and keeping control of my emails.
Seems like everyone here is asking the same thing I am about this “9 reasons to archive”: How is that different than what I’m already doing? What is functionally different about archiving vs leaving all 11000 emails in my inbox?
9 reasons not to delete, sure, but who deletes stuff that’s not spam? Also this idea of filing emails in folders is new to me, what purpose does that serve when you can just do a search? Are the folders for like, when you’re not looking for something in particular but just want to browse through old email? I don’t get it. Who has the time to sort their email into freakin’ categories anyway? I don’t even have time to read all of it!
Google does not explain whether archived mail will be taken into account for calculating the storage limit.
I think that article was geared towards people who delete their emails. I don’t think archiving is much different than leaving the emails in the inbox.
As for folders, why not just make good use of tags? They provide the same functionality as folders.
@ Christine - you can use labels to organise your mail into your own categories. Then you can either leave the mail showing in your inbox (where the labels will also show up) or you can archive and only see the mail when you click on the label name.
That said, I have no clue why archiving is that much better than leaving stuff in your inbox. I skip my inbox for some things, where I just need a record but not to see each email as it comes in (like code commit alerts for my coding projects), but my regular mail just sits in my inbox. Unless it would make it quicker to load?
Reason why you should archive instead of keeping all of your mail in Inbox is that it helps you to more easily focus on important messages that need your attention longer. Combining that to good use of tags is another way to arrange your emails to different “boxes”. Usually I add labels like “TODO” to items that contain some things that should be done and/or label message as “Links” if it contains some good ones. You should learn to create filters to automatically label (and/or archive) things based of content so that it keeps email more organized and easier to manage.
I archive because of this reason.
There are generally a couple of emails I don’t ever open. I archive those (I don’t think I deleted any email in the recent past) so that I can keep track of how many new messages I get in a day.
If I leave those emails in my inbox I would never know. I would have 300 new emails for example but 295 of those would be older messages I don’t care about, when I archive I know I have exactly 5 new messages - not really a big deal, but I’ve gotten used to it and it helps keep my inbox organized.
I think a lot of the early commentators on this post missed this part of the 9 reasons:
clean inbox = clean mind
Asking why to archive rather than leave everything in your inbox is like asking why anyone would put books on a bookshelf or clothes in a wardrobe/closet rather than have them spread out on your floor.
clean inbox = clean mind ?
I think its more like:
If you need a clean inbox to clear your mind -> use archive. That is google’s philosophy, but not mine.
Personally I don’t use my email as my todo, or calendar or anything like that. My email is more like my telephone. I am only concerned with “the now”. And since all my emails are sorted by date, I don’t need to archive them to know that the ones at the top are the only ones I need to be interested in.
Google’s in the wrong business if they want to clear our minds. I just want to see today’s email.
After reading all the comments I’m still with the people who just leave everything in there inbox. I get way too much mail to file it away every day - leaving it in the inbox and searching for it is still what makes most sense, otherwise I’d be creating new auto-filtering rules almost every day.
If you’re taking the time to clear your inbox every day, maybe you’ve just got too much time on your hands ;-)
Well, a closer analogy as I see it is asking why you would have a two functionally identical wardrobes, except use one for clothes that you’ve recently bought and another for clothes that you’ve had for a while. Why not just keep everything in one wardrobe, especially when they’re already ordered?
I have a totally different view point. Archiving (or keeping it in the inbox is oK). I am against keeping everything:
http://blog.gadodia.net/gmail-9-reasons-not-to-archive-messages/