From May. But I only have 17 items in my inbox, and 10 of them are from the last 2 days. I keep a well-ordered inbox.

Yeah, I should've said that I had 7,500 items in my Inbox before I got down to some serious shit-kicking. Now I have only eight.

Make that seven - one was spam.

I love the gmail approach to email. I keep my inbox nice and tidy (the only emails that stay in there are ones that I need to reply to or otherwise require my attention; right now there are 7 because I've been especially lazy lately), but I love having google's search capability on the entirety of my email life since getting the account. I find labels much more useful than folders as well, especially because labels can be used exactly like folders if you so choose. I'm no packrat but many times having all that email easily accessible has saved my bacon.

If only Outlook at work came even close. I often have issues arise that last arose (literally) years ago, and it is really difficult to find pertinent emails that could possibly remind me what solved the problem last time, despite my best efforts at organization.

I'm guessing, but I'd say I have emails dating back to about 1993 from when I was extremely active in and admin-ing a very active regional arts/music list.

I still go back and read or refer to them.

I also have a 1995/1996 era yahoo account with similar archival purposes, and I pretty much never delete any of the email in my new gmail account.

Seriously, that's saved my ass so many times, from finding phone numbers to addresses to old emails and communications with landlords or bosses, etc. Or even old file attachments/pictures. It's all there.

I don't delete anymore. I just search.

Now if I could get the power of PINE or ELM wrapped around the crunchy Google goodness I'd be in heaven.

heh! jan 27, 2004, somebody looking for teaching assistants.
I too have a fairly "clean" INBOX (only 200 emails!), but I just realized I also have 49(!) other folders where I keep important correspodence. So important, I had totally forgotten about it. The oldest email I found there(although there might be some older ones) was from Jul 11, 2003. Boring work related stuff.
Oh! gosh! I need to clean my email account. Gee, thanks dodgy!

On my home computer I've got a folder called 'Keepers' where I save things I want to keep, usually gems of wisdom that or personal stories that people on my AA email list have written. The oldest one in there is around 3 years old.

I also have lots of mail from George that I've kept, nothing special about it, just him telling me about his day. I can't bring myself to delete any of it.

At work I've archived all email from management, just in case. It's come in useful a few times. That goes back to 2000.

I just recently went through and deleted a lot of old emails, so my oldest is:

Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 12:35:25 -0800 (PST)

At work I just use procmail to put different mailing lists and sender patterns into different folders, which makes the volume far more manageble, and keeps my inbox simple.

My work box has email from march 2002. My home email archive, though not complete, starts from some time in 1991.

I have zero emails in any of my Inboxes, as I too have A System.

First of all, I use IMAP, which is absolutely, positively Rule Number One for anyone who manages multiple accounts and folders. Second, I create two folders named "1) TODO" and "2) IN PROGRESS". Finally, I create several folders for completed items with names like "Household", "Personal", "Receipts", and such.

When email hits my Inbox, I either move it to a folder or respond immediately and then move it to a folder, always keeping the Inbox clean. I check up on the TODO and IN PROGRESS folders several times throughout the day, moving emails out to their appropriate folders once complete.

Previously, I treated my Inbox as a to-do list, but it always ended up hundreds of megs in size and I was constantly losing stuff or kept forgetting to reply to certain emails because I kept thinking I'd get to them later. This system has worked wonders for me for over a year now.

I keep a clean inbox for all my accounts. I generally have no more than 10 messages at any one time.

The only exception is that I have kept every email I have ever received from my wife, dating back to when we first met in 2002.

I have a rule that all email in my inbox must be visible without scrolling. If I have to scroll, I clean it out. When I used Outlook at various jobs, I had a million folders and archived everything. Right now, I use gmail for both school and home. My home account has an email I'm saving as a reminder from July 2006, but my oldest school email is October 10.

My work accounts are pretty clean (though I delete nothing), but my personal inbox is mostly unorganized and I don't delete much besides obvious spam. But this makes sense due to my lack of a personal life.

My oldest personal email is from 2001. It's actually an email I sent myself from a friend's AOL account. It's an Einstein quote:

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The
latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

The next oldest email is two years older and it's the offer letter for my first job out of college.

The oldest I have in Mail.app is from 1997 (which is when I first got a non-University email address, I think) and is from a printer, asking for me to drop off the ZIP disk of the PageMaker file (retro!) for a poster I was designing for a nightclub, but my Inbox is gloriously empty. I use a similar system to eamondaly's - the trick really is responding immediately to everything you can...

If you use Mail.app, MailActOn is the bees knees for keeping everything in order as quickly as poss. - it lets you use command key activated rules that put messages in the right folders (ctrl-F puts stuff in the Friends folder, ctrl-w in Work, ctrl-x bumps stuff straight into the archive folder for this month, &c.). Then on the first of every month, I dump all mail left in the current folders and into an archive folder for the previous month (since everything is semi-automatically tagged at the same time it's filed away by MailActOn , these big monthly archives are still easily sortable).

Er yeah, fascinating stuff!

In other news, it must be nice to be paid to summarise the archives of 43Folders and Lifehacker like Mr. Burkeman...

March. I have 15 email messages in my work inbox.

I have every non-spam email ever sent to me archived in one form or another. Oldest would be 1993. On this machine the oldest mail I have is from March 8, 2001.

In my Inbox 4/8/2005 (but it's one of only 12 items), in my Saved folder the oldest I could spot without a lot of digging is 10/8/1995. I had a hard drive crash at some point right before then and lost a handful of older messages dating back to probably the middle of 1993.

I have about forty messages in my Inbox and the oldest is from mid-September.

Different circumstances seem to require different kinds of filing. I had a job where I worked on about 6 projects, but the project teams were often made up of the same people. So sorting e-mails by project or subject didn't work because they would talk about different things they were doing for me in the same e-mail. So I sorted the best I could, but at the end of each month I took the last month's e-mails across all folders and filed them in a folder labeled with the month and year. That was in Outlook. At the end of a year and a half there, I had about 5,000 e-mails archived! That was in Outlook.

I'm proud to say that any of those which asked me for anything, had gotten a response in 48 hours!

I also think this system worked because I tend to remember things by how long ago it felt like they happened.

Now, I have been doing one thing (school), and getting e-mail from various departments or groups about things I need to do for them. These groups never mix with each other. Organizing by topic has worked very well. Some of my categories are administrative notices, class, departmental program, work, and "thesis".

My personal account filters according to mailing list, and I archive off the lists into folders like "advice", "jokes", and "technical information". My personal e-mails stay in the inbox until I archive them (it's Gmail).

Nerd Alert: When I get personal e-mails that I want to keep, I print them and put them with my letters. I have some from 1994, screen captures off my university's MVS system.

1997 - Sale receipt for Swedish Penis Pump from Amazon.com

I have a couple random, completely unimportant ones from my grandfather who died three years ago. I guess I could move them, but I like just seeing them there.

I'm really surprised no one has said it's "Welcome to Microsoft Outlook"