Tame the Monster in Your Inbox

At first glance, this blogpost does not appear intelligence related. But if we use some of the principles of document security developed by intelligence entities all over the world, we can improve our personal comfort and safety.

So I offer this to my readers as an ancillary topic that Jade Wilmerton, the Section librarian in Quiet Move, would applaud. I learned file management principles in the Air Force during the Cold War. They apply equally well to today's electronic files.

Here are the basic habits drummed into me then that you will need now:

1. Try not to touch any inbox document more than once.

2. Handle all documents with the level of care corresponding to their sensitivity.

3. Do not keep any document longer than necessary.

4. Destroy or transfer to archives all documents no longer needed locally—again, with the level of care corresponding to their sensitivity.

All well and good, you say, but how do I deal with the mountain before me?

I know a woman who is on her third email provider because she has maxed out all the free storage given by the other two. She is well on the way to filling the storage in this one. In Cold War terms, she has filled two and a half large warehouses to their tall ceilings. One person. Largely with advertisements. If you are anywhere near this predicament, I suggest the following:

Determine retention requirements of each general document category. There is no need to keep an advertisement of a sale that ended yesterday. Here are my categories and their periods of retention:

1. General Correspondence: three months.

2. Special Category: one year after close of category.

3. Tax information:

Individual: three years after it is used in tax filing.

Business: seven years after it is used in tax filing.

4. Essential personal information: until changed or replaced.

5. Historical information: archive after one year or one year after end of category.

SHORT VERSION:

Wipe it all out, every folder and skip to the section on basic maintenance. Chances are you will have lost nothing important. If you are a bit OCD about keeping things, the following procedures may help. Pick and choose what fits your situation and style. 

LONG VERSION. If your email account is set to archive, change that to the trash can icon instead of the file box. Email providers often set archive instead of trash as default in order to grow your storage to the point of being able to charge you for it. Move everything in ARCHIVE to trash . If this feature has ever saved you something important, you are a unicorn. It has allowed a bunch of information about you to hang around largely unsecured, possibly for years.

Now, let’s look at each category again, backwards, in the context of five gigabytes of emails.

5. Historical information. If you can remember an email, or more likely a series of emails that you think you should keep in perpetuity (it has to be memorable to be in this category at all—do not search five gigabytes of info on the off chance there might be something), use the search bar in 'all messages', or if your email provider doesn’t offer a global capability, search in each possible folder, like INBOX or IMPORTANT. Do not search TRASH. If it is important enough to remember now, you did not trash it. You have this problem because you have a tendency not to trash things. If you find your historical emails, move them to a new folder labeled HISTORY. Go on to the next category.

4. Essential personal information. These are things like birth certificates and divorce decrees. On your email account they would be in attachments to emails. You should have downloaded them, printed hard copies and saved the pdfs to a folder you know how to get to. If you did not do so when you received them, either conduct a search (again, not the trash folder) or obtain new copies and do that this time. Delete the emails they came in. Essential personal documents should not be hanging around unprotected in cyberspace. They are by nature sensitive.

At this point, delete every email in every folder older than seven years if you own or owned a business during that time, three years if not. Go on to the next category.

3. Tax information. Here you are looking for whatever you would need to show the IRS in the event of an audit. Again, you should have hard copies and if applicable, electronic copies on a secure medium. These are highly sensitive by nature and should not be hanging around online. Secure them and move on to category two.

2. Special category. You had a project that created a lot of back and forth traffic. The project is over. Maybe you closed on a house. By now, you already should have secured the more important tax, mortgage and closing documents. Search for any emails pertaining to the project. This will be a limited number. You will have to look at them to come up with your own criteria for what is worthy of being stored for one year. Chats with the realtor can be binned. Reminders about taxable or deductible items you have not yet filed on a 1040 are more important. Create a folder on the email account with the title of the project, like HOUSE. Put these emails into it. Go on to the last category.

1. General correspondence.

Delete everything in TRASH older than three months. If your email provider lets you specify length of time to hold trash, set it to three months. If they don’t, find another provider. 

Note: with big files like these, you may have to develop a daily habit of deleting the lists page by page. It will be worth it, I assure you.

Quickly glance at the most recent emails in SPAM (no more than two weeks). If something you wanted wound up there, rescue it by moving to INBOX and delete the rest.

Delete everything older than three months in SENT. You should have already moved the important stuff to other folders or to secure storage. If you are paranoid about your sent file because you think you may have to prove you sent it, I’ve known people who keep these one year. After that, it’s a liability. These are your words floating around. Check your settings for this folder. Set to three months (or one year if you’re worried).

Delete everything in any other mailbox created by the email provider that is NOT labeled INBOX. These extraneous folders are how the provider hides emails from you. The fact that you’ve lived well without them means they are largely meaningless. Most will be advertisements.