I think you're absolutely right. We've actually been thought by Gmail not to remove messages but instead archive them and that's a good philosophy.

I've been on Gmail since 2005 and have about 100,000 messages at 20 GB. There's messages coming in from 25 different addresses at 300/day with 100 being spam.

I don't feel like I'm an email power user though, I imagine people in sales do about 100x more than this.

It's definitely a requirement to be able to do this and I feel even if we would be outliers, in a couple of years we won't be anymore.

And at least Google seems to think so; they worked with me to get my mail fast and working well. They asked me to turn stuff on and off, reroute addresses for a while and such until my mail (as it is now) was fast and solid. I think they do expect a lot of people to be like me in the future.

You said the following two things which are mutually exclusive:

I wrote an export script for the mail system I was using at the time and imported 10 years of mail into gmail.

I don't think so though; people are lazy and if the default status is that you can keep everything you have anyway

The default status is that stuff goes away. I believe you're arguing that "this time it's different" but I see no evidence for that. In fact, there is a post almost every day on HN about Gmail users looking for an alternative. I myself can't wait to get off Gmail. When I do that I'll happily explicitly delete my Gmail account and all the email in it. Because I am lazy and it's easier to do that than it is to write a script to transfer it to what I use next.

You seem to come from the same time as I do ; I had my first modem around '85 and was very active on BBSes.

I got my first modem in 1985, got a phone line as my Christmas present from my parents in 1986 and started my own BBS. Started a consulting company in 1993. Started a small ISP in 1996, sold it in 1998 and started working for corporate America.

In the U.S., I find from a legal perspective that the less documentation you have the better. That's why every large U.S. company has an email retention policy that is very short. Anyone looking to sue you needs proof and often that proof comes from your own records as part of discovery since they don't have any proof. If as part of a standard process you delete everything you're not legally required to retain then you can't be forced into helping their case.

> I wrote an export script for the mail system I was using at the time and imported 10 years of mail into gmail. > I don't think so though; people are lazy and if the default status is that you can keep everything you have anyway

My, old person who grew up in the 80s, case versus people I know and talk to who are <= 20 y/o now.

> In the U.S., I find from a legal perspective that the less documentation you have the better. etc

This particular thing was a large project, paid for by a gov grant (not sure if that's the correct word, but I think it means the same) early and ran from 2001-2009; the grant was for millions. A few years ago, suddenly they came to check on the project; see if all paperwork is in order, hours written etc. Now during one of the office moves, someone misplaced the actual paperwork we prepared for this including CDs with source code, revision history etc (Now only if there was some kind of storage on internet to store this on...). We would have to pay that money back + fines if we cannot actually prove we did the work and who did it. In your case, we would've had to pay the money/fines, because outside my mail, there was no way to prove anything. And these gov checkups come years and years after the fact.

Granted; this was a stupid mistake of someone who thought the boxes were full of outdated crap, maybe even an external mover, however, I don't see the downside with keeping everything in this case. Especially if you have a company. In the US you have all kinds of legal issues; I understand that, we don't have that really, so worrying that someone will check your mail, even in courtcases, is not very likely.