A Human Approach to Email Archiving: What to Keep, Why to Keep It, and How to Start

Email archiving sounds like the kind of thing you’ll figure out someday. It sits on the same to-do list as cleaning out the garage or organizing old family photos. Most of us have inboxes bursting with newsletters, receipts, vacation rental confirmations, and the occasional email that actually matters. The idea of sorting or preserving any of that feels exhausting. But what if it didn’t have to?

Whether you are an archivist working with someone else’s inbox, or just a person who has a lot of email and a vague sense of dread about it, there are ways to make email archiving less overwhelming and more useful. This post walks through two big categories: managing your own email and managing an email collection. They share some of the same tools and concepts, and both start with asking what email is, why it matters, and how you can begin.

What Makes Email Worth Saving?

Email has replaced a lot of things we used to print, file, or mail. It’s correspondence, documentation, invitation, and conversation. In an archival context, email takes the place of letters, memos, press releases, meeting minutes, drafts, photographs, and more. It’s often where the record of work really lives. But because email is digital, and because it accumulates so fast, it doesn’t always get treated with the same care.

Most people assume their email is safe because it’s in the cloud. Gmail, Apple, Outlook, and other providers make it feel like your inbox is permanent and retrievable. But those systems fail. They have storage limits. They might suddenly start charging for access or delete inactive accounts. More importantly, while you may own the content of your inbox, you don’t necessarily hold it. If you want long-term access, you need to bring your email under your own control.

Managing Your Own Inbox (Without Despair)

Let’s start with your personal email. Maybe you have 80,000 messages in there. Maybe you have three folders that you created ten years ago and forgot how to use. Maybe you’ve thought about cleaning it up but never got past that first scroll.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to do this all at once. And you definitely don’t need to go email-by-email. In fact, that kind of item-level processing would be considered impractical by most archival standards. You can take broad strokes. You can start with what feels obvious and manageable.

For example, you might open your inbox on your computer instead of your phone one day and see a message that feels either really important or really pointless. If it’s pointless, unsubscribe. If it’s something you might want to find again someday, create a filter or label. Most email programs make this easy. You check the box, click the kebab menu, and select “Create filter.” You can choose to apply a label, archive it, star it, or forward it elsewhere.

This is not deep organization. It’s triage. You’re separating the definitely-keep from the definitely-delete. Over time, you can refine your labels or folders, but this first pass is about easing the noise and getting a feel for what’s there.

You might also consider how much of your inbox is being eaten up by attachments. A regular email might only be 75 kilobytes, but a single photo or PDF can be 5,000 or 16,000 kilobytes. If you’re hitting storage limits, cleaning up old attachments can make a much bigger impact than trying to delete text-only messages.

What About Long-Term Preservation?

Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s nice, but I don’t need to keep any of this forever.” That’s fair. You might not. But some people do. Maybe you’re switching institutions and need to bring work-related correspondence with you. Maybe you’re saving personal history for family. Maybe you’re just someone who likes to be thorough.

Preserving email doesn’t have to mean printing it out or dragging everything into a single mega-folder. It means exporting it. Taking your emails out of your provider’s system and saving them somewhere you control. That might be on an external hard drive, in cloud storage, or even in a digital preservation system.

Think of it like putting your emails in a shoebox. You don’t have to look at them every day, but they’re there if you need them. Tools like Google Takeout let you export all your Gmail messages in a format that can be preserved. You can even convert those into formats that work better for long-term storage.

This doesn’t have to be an everyday task. You can treat it like going to the dentist. Schedule it once or twice a year. Export your emails. Label the folder with a date. Put it in your shoebox. Move on.

From Personal Archiving to Institutional Collections

Once you start thinking about your own email in this way, it’s a short step to thinking about email as a collection. Maybe you’ve inherited a professional inbox from a colleague. Maybe your archive has acquired the email of a public figure. Maybe you’re building an institutional email preservation policy. Whatever the case, the same basic ideas apply.

First, you don’t need to process email item by item. You can apply the same principles of arrangement and description that guide physical collections. Emails can be grouped by sender, subject, time period, or function. Filters and tags can do a lot of that work upfront. Exported email collections can be processed using tools built by and for archivists. One example is ePADD, which helps you process, browse, and provide access to email archives.

Second, email collections are not static. They often come with risks and challenges. Passwords, privacy concerns, file sizes, proprietary formats, and other technical issues make email harder to manage than a box of letters. But the value is there, especially when the content includes correspondence, planning, decision-making, and context that doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Finally, the work is ongoing. Just like physical archives need reboxing, rehousing, and rethinking over time, email collections may require re-exporting, reformatting, or reassessment. That’s normal. The goal isn’t to get it perfect the first time. The goal is to create enough structure and context that someone else could pick up where you left off.

Email Archiving Is Not Just for Archivists

You don’t have to work in a GLAM institution to care about email archiving. And you don’t have to understand metadata schemas or file preservation tools to start managing your own inbox in a more thoughtful way. You just have to carve out a little time, set a few intentions, and start small.

For archivists and digital preservation professionals, email archiving is already becoming part of the job. More collections include email. More donors communicate digitally. More research questions depend on the stories and context hidden in inboxes. Knowing how to process, preserve, and provide access to email is quickly becoming a core skill.

And for everyone else? It’s still worth asking yourself what’s in your inbox, what you might want to save, and how much better it would feel if that wasn’t all sitting on someone else’s server with no backup.

Curious What an Email Archive Can Look Like?

If you want to see what a processed email collection looks like, visit ePADD’s public collections. You can browse a real corpus of messages, grouped and described in ways that are useful for researchers. It’s a powerful reminder of how much context and history lives inside what looks like just another email thread.

Want Help Getting Started?

This post only scratches the surface. If you’re feeling inspired to take on your inbox, or if your organization is starting to think about preserving email more formally, we can help. Backlog has worked with institutions of all sizes to process and preserve digital collections, including email.

You can reach out for a consultation, attend one of our webinars, or ask for a copy of the presentation slides used in the session this post is based on. And if you just want a friendly voice to talk you through exporting your Gmail archive, we’re here for that too.

Your email might be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Small steps count. And some of those steps might just be worth saving.