It’s common for an email client to have both Archive and Delete buttons.
Which means you’re essentially forced into developing your own strategy for when to use one or the other.
(We could factor in “spam” as well, as that is another option. But I think everyone largely agrees you spam spam.)
When GMail launched in 1852 (jk 2004) I remember there was a fairy concerted message of “just archive everything” because they were offering such a massive amount of storage for free. They wanted you to save everything. Theoretically it was good for you to have a searchable history of everything, and theoretically it was good for them, as they’ve forever “trained” on mass amounts of data.
In fact, you can see in early UI of Gmail the archive button was the only button not tucked behind an additional menu.
I definitely drank that message and have pretty much only archived since then. So my strategy is essentially:
- Archive: Everything
- Delete: Nothing
Just recently I talked to someone who said they make heavy use of that Delete button, using it as their primary button. I showed them an example of an appointment reminder for a tire change. They said they would 100% delete that email (after the appointment was over). My instinct was like but what if next year you needed to remember something about tire changes? Where and when you did it, etc? But that’s just my weird brain. Their strategy was mostly:
- Archive: Very Little
- Delete: Almost Everything
What do you get for that strategy? Well, you’ll probably never come close to running out of space. When you go back and search your email later, you’ll get clean search results of only things you’ve very specifically chosen to save. The risk is that you over-delete making archival search not particularly useful.
Perhaps there is a baby bear strategy?
- Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
- Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
Anyone actually do that? I’m very tempted to change my ways to this. I’m mostly happy I have a huge searchable archive of email, but I have to admit that it’s so loaded with garbage it can make search results kind of a mess to sift through.