On 02/28/2011 12:53 PM, Gary Smith wrote: >> I think this would be a great idea. Many end users never bother >> to delete old emails and on some, such as sales etc, there is no >> valid reason for them to countinue to waste disk and server space. >> >> http://www.zdnet.com/news/should-emails-have-an-expiration-date/6197888 > > No since emails are now a large part of business processes and those > business processes become your basis for legal protected, allowing > the sender to say "x-delete: 24 hours" and then sues you for > something for which you no longer have any proof would cause > significant global catastrophe.
I do like the idea with respect to alerts; if email programs (especially those on smart phones) would know to avoid alerting you of unread + expired messages, that could be quite beneficial. Especially if I could set expiration times with thunderbird filters. This becomes immediately useful for systems like logwatch, nagios, and hudson as well as manual things like "let's do lunch." As to wasting space; I think this is never a valid excuse. For anything. We are in an age of data parsing. The more data, the better. Deleting things should be reserved for special cases, and forcing users to delete things is never wise (especially given the ever-decreasing cost of disk space). Instead of deleting these things, there should be systems for automatically recognizing them and shoving them into bins that would be seen as acceptable losses if something were to go wrong (i.e. an area disconnected from backups and excluded from searches by default). Google's Priority Inbox is a great step in this direction. Spam is a salient counter-example because it contains no value whatsoever (well, unless you're in the spam-fighting business). Anything else, even your aunt's all-caps derogatory jokes, has at least a shred of value (it tells you she was awake at the time, the massive Cc list might give you a relative's contact info, the absence of certain people from the list might help determine when their falling-out happened, etc).
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