A sort of spring cleaning

[sharan]

I guess knowing you're leaving a job after 4 years really makes you think about things. Friday I realized that if I was going to be leaving I had 4 years of e-mail I needed to start going through and dumping. I had over 14,000 e-mails in my e-mail archive here, and converting Groupwise archives to Eudora will probably be a pain (and do I really need most of this crap?) so most of it's going to wind up dumped. By the time I left Friday I was down to 4000 messages, and I'm under 3000 now.

So I went home determined to do the same thing with Eudora. I'm on a ton of mailing lists (most of which I haven't even been reading) and many of them have e-mails piled up back 2 years or more. When I open Eudora and have several dozen mailboxes open (I keep any mailboxes with unread messages open so I'll know what I haven't read), and so much e-mail in each that it's going to take a while to go through it all, it's no wonder I'm so bad at answering e-mails! I realized recently that when I spot something when checking webmail from work I can actually respond to it, but at home I'm really terrible about responding to anything:(.

So this weekend I went through and I figure I trashed about 35,000 messages (yes, you read that right, and I still have a way to go, too). It was well over 100 megs of disk space, too. It took a long time even if I was being pretty ruthless about it. I still have a bunch of mailboxes open, but it's not QUITE as overwhelming. I even did a little cleaning up in my room.

I really need to work on getting organized. I've been thinking it would be nice if I could line up enough freelance work to pay the bills while I'm in school so I don't have to worry so much about getting a job where I go in to an office. But I'd have to be a lot more organized than I am now to pull that off!

Comments

[jcholewa.livejournal.com]

Wow, six hundred. That makes a packrat like myself absolutely shudder.

A quick 'find ~/Maildir/ | wc -l' tells me that I have well over a hundred thousand emails from '98 to now, excluding spam. This feels oddly sad. ^_^

[sharan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's down below 200 now! At least I found out from one of the IT guys how to move things out of the archive and into regular e-mail, so I can forward at least some of it to myself at home:). Most of it really was work related and worthless to me anyway.

100,000? That is a lot! I've probably got at least that at home, but I've never figured out how to find out how many messages I have in Eudora. I have e-mails back to 1997 there. The 35,000 messages I deleted this weekend probably didn't make THAT big a dent in it. I'm hoping if I don't have quite so much unread e-mail sitting around I'll start actually reading and responding to it more;).

[jcholewa.livejournal.com]

I think Eudora stores its mail files in straight mbox format, or something really similar. You could just gzip and email the mail files to you and reconstitute them so that they appear not as a forward but as the actual, original messages.

[sharan.livejournal.com]

Well, if I used Eudora here at work it wouldn't be a problem. Eudora messages are stored as text so they should be pretty easy to convert. Unfortunately they use Novell Groupwise, and I suspect that uses a proprietary format. I've tried looking for freeware programs to convert formats, but all I've been able to find are free trials of commercial software, and I suspect those would be too limited to convert everything.

Well, I suspect once I finish cutting out the e-mails I don't want to keep there shouldn't be THAT many left that I'm forwarding to myself at home at least.

[jcholewa.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh, now you make me want to come over and play with your work's servers. But you're too far away. :(

[sharan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is a little too far. Oh, well. I don't think the IT department here would be too happy about that anyway. The head of IT gets pretty picky about things like that. A former programmer here had it pretty much hinted to him once that not shutting his computer down at night was a violation of company policy could be cause for dismissal:P.

[jcholewa.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on the machine. I left my Windows 2000 machine at work on for three thousand hours some time last year, and when I finally rebooted it, a ton of the software (most of the Microsoft stuff, like MS Office, MSIE, most of the Control Panel applets, etc..) just refused to run, so I had to reinstall. On the flip side, I have an X11 session that runs continuously on our FreeBSD server in Texas, and that only reboots when our crappy hosting provider gets a blackout.

[sharan.livejournal.com]

Well, this had nothing to do with the machine itself. IT just wanted to be able to push changes to everyone's computers, which they could only do when someone logged in to the network apparently. What I don't understand is why they didn't just tell it to install the next time someone logs in no matter when that is instead of having it expire after a couple of days. People WILL reboot eventually, but sometimes you're in the middle of something and have a lot of windows open and it's a pain to have to reopen everything and figure out where you were.

Well, this place can be a real beauracracy sometimes. Very Dilbert-ish;).