[yjftsjthsd-h]

Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of having 17k emails but you're right, the software should be able to support it.

[seszett]

What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades?

Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.

[yonrg]

I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of mails.

Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox viewes.

[Jorengarenar]

I delete e-mails the moment I don't need them anymore.

Right now, on my main mail, I have ~400 mails in Trash, but only 10 in Inbox and Archive + another dozen in Sent.

[seszett]

I sometimes wish to find emails that I couldn't have known I would need again.

Right now, I've been looking for the email address of the landlord of the house I lived in until 2009. I'm happy that I didn't remove his email saying that his son would come on Friday to fix the door handle.

[zimpenfish]

Oh, it's a nonsense, definitely, but it only gets cleaned out every 6 months or thereabouts and I've not yet translated the rules in my cleaning script to Sieve rules to do it automatically.