Yesterday, after much consideration, I migrated my email service from Google Apps to Apple. I would have done this earlier, but Apple one recently offered the ability to use a personal domain (instead of @mac.com or at icloud.com).
I did this because I want to simplify my digital infrastructure. I host my blog at BlueHost, but would migrate it to Apple, if the company offered a platform for blogs.
Back in 2017, I made a mistake when updating my Insidesalesdude.com and ainslies.org blogs and inadvertently deleted my Google Apps account. It was a small nightmare. With the click of my mouse, I lost all of my email (which I had for ~10 years). I lost my Google phone numbers. I lost all of the documents I had created using using Google Docs and Numbers.
10 years of email lost. 5 years of work lost. Forever.
It was a bit of a panicky cluster**** to remedy. I spent about two days getting new accounts setup once my research made it clear that all of my data was irrecoverable.
It turned out to be fine.
Occasionally, I’d search for a resume or other document I once had. I could see the file, but couldn’t open it. What I saw was some sort of placeholder file shell for Google Apps.
As for my old emails, I never once missed them at all.
This time, when I decided to move my mail to Apple, I backed up all of my archived mail first. Since 2017, I had saved:
889 sent emails
18,800 received emails
WTF? How could I have saved over 18,000 emails in 5 years? More importantly, why?
My email process is to read an email, take action (or not) and then archive it. I rarely deleted email in case I ever needed to refer to it again.
That’s how I ended up with so many archived messages.
I sorted through these while migrating to Apple and was able to delete 15,000 emails. I had thousands of notifications from my credit card (which emails me any time I make a charge or a payment. I had thousands from Amazon (shipping notifications, order status updates etc.). I had thousands of emails from Insidesalesdude (business emails, newsletters,and blog updates). I had hundreds of receipts from various retailers.
They are now all gone.
It took me about 4 hours to clean out my email archive. I saved emails I thought were “important” like condolence messages I received after my wife died, personal emails from friends, emails relating to my home and life in the the past 3 years, etc.
I probably could have deleted everything and been fine starting with a blank slate.*
If anything, I had some poignant moments while rereading some of the condolence messages.
I must admit though, it was fun and stimulating to evaluate my entire digital infrastructure and to figure out how to transfer DNS, migrate email and leave Google Apps after more than 10 years. Even though my life is full and rich, I kind of miss playing around with technology.
Going forward, I have a new approach to email. I’ll be reading, acting and deleting a lot more and archiving much less.
Note: Two days later, after having 1000s of archived emails regenerate due to some syncing issue, I deleted all of them. I should have done this from the start.