I’ve done that about three or four times over the past 20 years. Sitting down to perform a big major archival move of thousands of emails and sorting through them and trying to preserve them in some kind of way.

Now I manage it by only keeping an active archive of about two years worth of email at time on my account. Once the New Year rolls around, I go into my email account and remove a year’s worth of email from the system. For instance this January, I went into my archive and kept in 2026 (current year), 2025 (last year), 2024 (year before that) and then removed 2023. The removed year is just archived in .eml format and kept mostly as text files so they will be easy to search later.

I haven’t had a real need to use those archives in all that time. But once in a while, especially if I am searching for an event, a person or a time when something happened, I’ll dive into the archives to search for clues that I could follow and they have been helpful a few times. Otherwise, it’s just nice to keep it all because once in a while, I just look through them like reading a journal of past events.