Friday, 21 June 2002 | Email

There was a time I had the luxury of keeping all email that was sent to me, including obese attachments and bad forwards, terse replies and timely invitations. Whenever my account would creep toward its capacity, I could simply delete the superfluous messages and stave off the inevitable a little while longer.

I no longer have any superfluous messages. As far as I can tell, every little minion that can be sacrificed already has been. I've sent myself old emails that I wanted to keep after ridding them of their attachments or their HTML. I've saved a modest amount to disk, and I've sent messages to other, roomier accounts. But of course every new day brings more kilobytes to manage, and I feel like I'm trying to stuff my feet into shoes that are too small.

Today I even looked through the folder that I had, until this point, refused to open, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in deleting any of the messages inside of it, no matter how hefty they were. I discovered I am not yet that desperate; I couldn't bring myself to delete any of it, or even resend it to myself in a smaller version, because I don't want to change anything about it, even though much of it I am not ready to re-read.