Sunday, April 20, 2008

Official Gmail Blog: 9 reasons to archive

Guess GMail wants all its users to archive their mail often.


We hear reports that many users don't archive their email. If you don't regularly click on the "archive" button or never even thought about it, here are some reasons you might want to get in the habit. Archiving just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. Your messages will be waiting for you when you click All Mail or search for them.

9. Phone numbers and addresses
You never know when you'll need a phone number someone emailed you or an address that was in a signature.

8. Procrastination
Sometimes you want to get a message out of your inbox, but you don't want to deal with organization, and you don't want to trash it.

7. Posterity
Just because you’re not famous now doesn’t mean that in forty years (or fifteen minutes) you won’t want to write your memoir.

6. Winning arguments
“But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….”

5. Mailing lists
Do you really need to know what Clintobamccain is doing every day? Auto-archive* their messages until you want to donate again.

4. Birthdays
Search for “grandma birthday” and voila, find the message you sent her last April. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted?

3. That guy
Remember that guy you thought you’d never need to get in touch with ever again?

2. Because you can
May as well use the free storage space. Plus, clean inbox = clean mind.

1. Fate-tempting is bad. You just never know
Thirty-one days after you send that message to the Trash and it gets permanently deleted, you're going to need it. Don't tempt the fates.


Guess Mails are filling up the harddrives, archiving might zip the contents and store it so that they take less space. Does gmail really have enough HardDrive space to give everyone 6GB+ of free email space ?

What do you think?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Granted, all the reasons in the Official Blog are good ones. However, the TOP reason why Google wants you to archive is that it gives them more data about you.

The more data from your emails they have about you, the better they can determine more about the kinds of advertising to aim at you. Google is not going to admit this in their advertisement blog.

Arun Prabhakar said...

Yup thats also one good reason

Anonymous said...

Usually you have top ten reasons, probably that's the missing tenth?