Last year I accidentally deleted all 800-plus emails in my work inbox. And then, because apparently once wasn’t enough data for a reliable study, six months later, I accidentally did it again.
The first time, I panicked. Eight hundred emails! Gone! Some of them had been sitting there for years, which surely meant they were important. I couldn’t have told you what was in most of them, but I had kept them. That seemed like compelling evidence.
For five minutes, I believed they had vanished forever. Then I found them in my Trash folder and felt an immense wave of relief.
For approximately eight seconds.
Because my 800 carefully preserved emails were now mixed in with roughly 2.7 million emails I had actually deleted over the previous several years. The potentially important messages were in there somewhere, mingling with expired coupons, old webinar invitations, and every LinkedIn notification I’d received since 2021.
Recovering them would require sorting through the other 2.7 million, a task for which I lacked both the time and the emotional support staff. After a few minutes of deep breathing, I decided to leave them where they were. If I needed one, I could search for it.
And then I waited to need one.
I waited for a coworker to ask about an attachment. I waited for a project to grind to a halt because the only record of a crucial decision was buried beneath an invitation to congratulate someone on a work anniversary. I waited for someone to say, “Stacey, do you still have that email?”
Nobody did. Including me.
I’d love to tell you I learned my lesson.
Six months later, I was attempting to send emails while clicking between browser tabs. How this resulted in the deletion of my entire inbox remains unclear. Unsolved Mysteries is still investigating.
One moment I had hundreds of emails. The next, my inbox was clean as a whistle and my Trash folder had acquired several hundred new roommates.
This time, I skipped straight past “They’re gone forever!” and moved on to “Well, I know where they live.” I briefly considered rescuing them. Then I remembered how urgently I’d needed the first 800, which was never.
So I left those in there, too.
I still expected consequences. Any day now, someone would demand a deliverable I’d agreed to provide in an email currently sharing a folder with a coupon for half-price printer ink. I’d discover I’d missed a meeting or someone would write, “As per the email I sent you last month…”
But nobody did.
Months passed. Projects continued. Meetings happened, as meetings are determined to do. No one asked for a crucial attachment. No one demanded to know why I hadn’t acted on something they sent in April.
At some point, I had to consider a deeply unsettling possibility: perhaps all those emails had been more important to me than I was to them.
I keep emails for the same reason I keep unidentified charging cables in a kitchen drawer. I don’t know what they’re for, but throwing one away feels like inviting a very specific emergency.
Some of those messages have been there so long that deleting them would feel like asking one of my children to move out.
You might think accidentally deleting my inbox twice would cure me of this habit. I’d like to tell you my inbox now contains only emails I need and that I spend ten minutes each Friday tending to it with the calm efficiency of a woman in a software commercial.
Instead, the number is creeping up again. Apparently my system is to save everything until I accidentally delete everything, then wait to see whether anyone complains.
I cannot recommend it. I also cannot argue with my results.
At this rate, I expect the third annual inbox purge sometime in the spring. If you need something from me, please send a new email at that time.
There should be plenty of room.
