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Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#61

Post by Terr_ »

aborsy wrote: post #52
subsection1h wrote: post #45

Seeing people in this thread say that they delete all their emails is super weird. I'd like to know their job titles, ages, etc. Do they not use email to converse with their lawyers, business associates, etc.?

I can’t delete or encrypt emails for the same reason. It’s a legal document, though I don’t know how it’s treated by the courts. Definitely it’s evidence.

A law/regulation that prevents you from even encrypting your backups? That sounds pretty weird.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#63

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

subsection1h wrote: post #45

Seeing people in this thread say that they delete all their emails is super weird. I'd like to know their job titles, ages, etc. Do they not use email to converse with their lawyers, business associates, etc.?

I’m a 40 years old programmer. I’ve never kept emails for more than a week. Everything is deleted once I have saved the attachments or replied to the mail.

Also I never had a lawyer or an associate, I only have friends.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#64

Post by XCSme »

not_your_vase wrote: post #7

No. Yolo. (Also, in the past 20 years I never needed to find any personal email that's older than a week, so I'm not terribly concerned about the effect of dataloss.)

It's also easier if you already think of emails as "disposables", so if you have any important information in them, you already back it up on a different medium.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#65

Post by DougN7 »

not_your_vase wrote: post #7

No. Yolo. (Also, in the past 20 years I never needed to find any personal email that's older than a week, so I'm not terribly concerned about the effect of dataloss.)

I would have agreed with you until this year where a single email from 18 years ago, which I didn’t think anything about at the time, is saving me from being sued. It doesn’t matter until it does. I got lucky.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#66

Post by lizzas »

not_your_vase wrote: post #7

No. Yolo. (Also, in the past 20 years I never needed to find any personal email that's older than a week, so I'm not terribly concerned about the effect of dataloss.)

I regular look at years old emails to check for things like who I was insured with for something or what SKU to reorder for a part. I like to backup with Google takeout for a "no brain" backup.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#68

Post by eadmund »

amelius wrote: post #12
LinuxBender wrote: post #10

Do you backup your Emails? Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.

Can you search through old emails easily?

https://notmuchmail.org/ is an excellent way to search through gigabytes of email extremely quickly. It’s faster than Gmail, Outlook or any other webmail provider.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#69

Post by aborsy »

Terr_ wrote: post #61
aborsy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t delete or encrypt emails for the same reason. It’s a legal document, though I don’t know how it’s treated by the courts. Definitely it’s evidence.

A law/regulation that prevents you from even encrypting your backups? That sounds pretty weird.

No, I meant, the evidence is lost when using end to end encrypted email (like with PGP or proton): the server as a trusted third party doesn’t have access to the email in plaintext to confirm the message or document.
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