If you have the space and can still find what you need quickly, why not just leave the archive as is? I haven't deleted much from gmail in two years, and still have plenty of space. If an email is project-related, I'll paste it into Evernote before archiving. The email archive has saved my butt a few times. For example, there was an error on my bank statement. I proved the bank incorrect by offering my daily balance summary email as proof of when the error occurred. I don't usually search directly from gmail often, but I'm glad I have that option when needed.

No. Receipts, yes. But I save those to my computer, not in my email account. Client communication I'd save, but again, not in my email account. Just my personal preference. I've set up a tickler system in my account, but that's where the archiving ends.

I'm for just tossing it in the archive and leaving it there permanently. There are some tags I use, but they're all general (work, school, etc) just so I can see things in a kind of context. I use search to find almost anything, and if I can't find it there, I go through the list by date and that usually takes care of it after a screen or three. The thing is, I used to keep emails in all kinds of folders and now I don't. It hasn't made much difference either way in retrieval, but it's made a big difference in filing time.

I haven't made this leap with my file system yet, but I'm getting close to that point. Since digital space is so cheap and getting cheaper, why bother to archive off things separately? I do a backup of my whole hard drive and that's it. For things like movies, which are huge, they go on an external drive, but that's pretty much it.

See, this is why I miss the early days of FileMaker, when FOSS standalone databases were so common. Claris Emailer plus a well-made FM archiver, and I was soooooo happy. :confused: