Penultimate Thoughts on The Loss of Written Correspondence

Was flying back from Dallas a couple of days ago and found a kindred soul in Kimberly Garza, a feature writer for Spirit, the Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine. Enjoy:


Why Save Your Email
To archive your life, avoid Delete.

By Kimberly Garza

My nose was pressed to the display glass, but I had to squint to read the slanted scrawl. Clearly, Evelyn Waugh's talents hadn't included penmanship. One snippet read:

I don't think I have ever had the chance to say either in public or private how much I admire your novels…?. Let me now salute your novels as works of high genius…?.

Waugh wrote the letter in 1947 to another English novelist, Graham Greene, and it now sat at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, with numerous other possessions from Greene's estate. Reading it, I was dazzled by the thought that the writers I studied, writers long dead and even longer admired, had once scribbled sloppily on paper. The English major in me thought, Greene saved that letter until he died, and because he did I can read it today. The pack rat in me thought, I guess I should drag that e-mail I sent to Elissa yesterday out of my Hotmail trash. It'll come in handy when I get my own exhibit.

Thanks to a constant stream of new and improved technology, Americans over the past few decades have traded their ballpoint pens and stationery for emoticons and BlackBerrys. I can count the number of handwritten letters I've received this year on one hand (let's be honest—one finger). Meanwhile, my inbox is packed to its gigabyte limits with birthday wishes and notes from far-away friends. I'm a stuff-saver by nature, so the idea of deleting any of these e-mails—from the lowliest Google Alert to Dad's latest funny forward—seems absurd. Someone's sent me a message on Facebook? Save. The travel itinerary for my trip to Vegas last January? Still sitting in my main folder. The notice earlier this year from our company's IT department warning me that I'm one of the 20 staffers with the most crowded inboxes? In my crowded inbox, naturally.

It was that last electronic letter—with my name in all caps printed among 19 other guilty offenders—that got me thinking about saving e-mails. Anyone with an inbox knows that the tech types advise us to clear out the junk and archive the important stuff. But who judges what's junk and what's important? John Adams penned a flirty letter to his future wife, Abigail, during the first stages of their courtship in 1762, calling her "Miss Adorable." The letter now sits in the Massachusetts Historical Society, along with some 1,100 other pieces of correspondence between the two. An uncorrected manuscript of the first Harry Potter book sold for nearly $34,000 at a June 2008 charity auction in London to none other than the new James Bond, Daniel Craig. When Adams was nothing more than a Massachusetts lawyer and Harry Potter just a thought in J.K. Rowling's head, neat-freak types might have considered those documents junk, too.

But e-mails have become our letters, and with that change in medium comes a whole new set of etiquette to learn, like "all caps equals rude shouting," and "for heaven's sake, please don't include 'LOL' in a professional note." Uncle Sam seems to share my opinion. In December 2006,
the U.S. federal courts changed their rules of procedure, making it clear to companies that e-mails fall under the same category as paper documents when it comes to record-keeping and potential evidence. IT consultant David W. Tschanz described the government's view on e-mails in a June 2008 article in Redmond magazine: "No matter how you choose to do it, e-mail archiving and maintaining compliance with legal, regulatory, and business mandates is as important an aspect of your messaging infrastructure as the servers you use and how they're configured."

The court's verdict affected the corporate world, too. Now most businesses accept e-mailed receipts and itineraries as proof when reimbursing expenses, as do accountants during tax season. Your flight confirmation e-mail may take up a milligram of space now, but it could mean the difference between $500 out of your wallet or in it. I learned that the hard way when I deleted my bank statement before our accounting manager asked me for proof that I had actually bought those stamps for the office. Luckily, I hadn't followed our IT guru's advice and emptied my trash—as he had begged me to do with an e-mail just that morning.

My IT guy apparently doesn't agree that e-mails are just as valuable as their paper counterparts. And he's not alone. "Deleting fast and well is actually one of the most difficult skills to master, since it requires you to be straight with yourself starting from the moment a new message arrives," writes Merlin Mann on the site 43folders.com. "Just remember that every e-mail you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big, dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf." But Andrew Flusche, a Virginia lawyer and blogger, says, "I never delete an e-mail that has value. Anything related to my clients or other business pursuits is saved indefinitely."

:-)

"But," he continues, "I don't advocate anyone saving pointless little e-mails," like "SuperPoke!" "Digg!" "A payment posted to your account."

:-(

That day in Austin's Ransom Center, browsing the rooms between lunch and Spanish 341K, I saw things that many might have considered "pointless" at one time: handwritten notes from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein taken during conversations with Deep Throat; Jack Kerouac's journal that he kept before he wrote On the Road; script drafts from Gone With the Wind.
Today's writer knows, as Kerouac and Greene did, that a successful piece arises from the ashes of countless earlier drafts. Poet Ezra Pound riddled drafts of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land with notes in the margins. But unlike in Eliot's day, most of this rewriting now happens in Microsoft Word. Without the e-mails between editor and writer, the entire shifting, complicated process would vanish into the ether—bad news for the Ransom Center should Spirit's own Mike Darling become the next Mark Twain.

And the same is true for non-writers. With e-mails taking the place of Post-its and love letters, those Times New Roman notes now serve as time capsules—yes, even the most trivial "Hope you're having fun in Australia, don't forget to bring me a boomerang" preserves a memory you can relive with every read. Say goodbye to the days of dusty file cabinets and pressed papers: Now preservation merely takes a point, a click, and a nanogram of a computer chip capable of storing thousands of digital letters. Billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made his own e-mail address public in 2000 and confessed on his blog that he has kept electronic correspondence dating back to the 1980s. "I had always wanted to keep each and every e-mail I ever got, figuring that it would be a history of my life that my kids and their kids could look back at just as I loved to look at old postcards, letters, and pictures of my parents and grandparents," he wrote in March 2008. "Each day I say goodbye to my little e-mail friends [by deleting], I feel like I'm cheating the future."

That sounds about right to me. Sure, it's probably safe to say the five-hour IM chat I had last week with a buddy in Guadalajara doesn't need to be transcribed for posterity. And maybe Perez Hilton won't be sharing his latest David Beckham blog posting with future grandkids—at least, not the way my grandmother shares with me her wedding photos, yellowed from age and the loving strokes of her fingers. But the cheery e-mail from my cousin Rob, thanking me for the care package and joking that Iraq's only slightly hotter than South Texas, isn't going anywhere. And neither is the electronic announcement from an old friend, telling me the baby is happy and healthy and looks just like her daddy. I'm keeping my own responses to those e-mails, too, no matter how many Top 20 Offenders lists I make. You never know when the Ransom Center will call.

Kimberly Garza is an assistant editor of Spirit.

----"Miss Adorable"? Who knew our second president was a flirt? You can read through the preserved letters of John and Abigail Adams here.

So Kimberly Garza convinced you of the wisdom of saving emails. Now what? These two sites offer tips on preserving e-mails in bulk. If you need more space to store your archived correspondence, check out this PC Magazine page on storage drives, or look into saving your data online.

Even more evidence that saving your correspondence could one day pay off big: Four letters James Bond author Ian Fleming sent to his "Miss Moneypenny" —Jean Frampton, his secretary—sold in April for more than $25,000.