I spent quite some times cleaning up my email thinking it would help to fix it. It did not, but it was nice
My email provider is Disroot, it has worked wonderfully for me for the past 3 or so years. They gave me a single free gigabyte of storage, and so far, it has been more than enough.
However, one day I started noticing a really weird behaviour in my email app K-9 Mail, I stopped being able to access most email folders, other than the Inbox one, and I stopped being able to vew old emails on it.
I noticed that if I logged in via their web client, I could access everything without any problem. I decided to check if anything was wrong and noticed there was an email in my Spam folder, claiming that my email storage was reaching its limit. The emails were of course fake, all the links lead somewhere else if I hovered on them, but I wondered if there was some truth in there.
Maybe they blocked IMAP or SMPT access if the storage filled up? maybe they just blacklisted me somehow? How long would it take for them to let me in again!?
I decided it wouldn’t hurt to just remove some old emails. I had a lot of package tracking notifications, GitHub threads of old issues, random marketing and advertisement and the like. Last time I did this I deleted and unsubscribed from a lot of stuff, but in this case, most emails were OK, just old and no longer needed. So to the trash they went!
I had some really nice conversations archived in there, none of which I deleted of course, since they were a nice trip down memory lane. I love getting emails from people who read me and want to talk. I have managed to make a lot of new friends since then too, and we have had some nice conversations.
Some of those relationships have moved to Signal or Matrix now, but sometimes I wish we could go back. Maybe I will shoot an email to some of them and see if it sticks.
There’s something quite special about emailing back and forth, you can take your time between each response, without feeling obligated to constantly check notifications, it feels right to me, to never be left “on read” or write something important to you only to get a one word reply. Send me more emails please.
Anyway, back to my email cleanup quest. Did deleting all the garbage even work?
Nope
I was still unable to access all of my old emails for some reason.
I decided to check the settings again, see if there was something wrong.
It was then that I realized my mistake.
I went to my Account Settings, and saw the option Sync messages from set to the last week.
This parameter meant that every email received more than a week ago was simply not fetched, unless I specifically searched for it.
After setting that to any time, all of my emails came back to me, and I was happy again.
I have no idea how that setting got there, I think I did it myself at some point thinking it meant something different when it did not.
Regardless. Now my email is back to normal and all that cleanup wasn’t really necessary. But it is always nice to tidy up my emails a bit, and to look back to older times.
