I've Started Deleting All My Emails. And I've Never Felt More Free

Christopher Graham
Founder & CEO

Business owners don't usually celebrate losing ten years of email. I certainly didn't.

When we migrated from an ageing system to Microsoft 365, it quickly became apparent that a number of historic emails had become corrupted and simply couldn't be recovered.

At first, it felt like a disaster. In reality, it turned out to be one of the most useful things that's happened to the way I work.

For years, The Marketing Department had been using a hosted Microsoft Exchange service provided by a third party. It had served us reasonably well until a serious issue at the provider resulted in some of our data being lost. With no realistic way of recovering everything, we decided the time had come to move to Microsoft 365. In truth, it was probably overdue anyway. The long-term costs stacked up better, the support would come directly from Microsoft, and we'd be moving onto a platform with a much clearer future.

The migration itself was remarkably straightforward, except for one thing. A surprising number of older emails simply wouldn't migrate because they'd become corrupted over the years. Watching the migration reports appear, my immediate thought was that we'd just lost a decade of business history.

Then I realised something rather unexpected. Had you asked me where I kept the history of a client relationship, I'd probably have answered, "Mostly in our emails.” Except it wasn't true.

For years, our CRM has automatically stored every important email against the relevant client, organisation or project, alongside notes, meetings, telephone calls, documents and opportunities. Without consciously deciding to, I'd stopped using email as my memory a long time ago.

Whenever I wanted to remind myself about a conversation, check what had been agreed or understand the background to a project, I wasn't opening my inbox. I was opening our CRM. Instead of searching for a message, I was looking at the complete history of a relationship.

That was the moment something clicked. If I was already using the CRM to find information, why was I carrying around ten years' worth of email on my Mac? Why was my iPhone synchronising hundreds of thousands of messages I'd almost certainly never read again? Why was my iPad doing the same?

The answer was simple: habit. Somewhere over the past twenty or thirty years, we've collectively started treating our inboxes as filing cabinets. I don't remember consciously deciding that email should become the permanent home for every conversation I've ever had, but that's exactly what happened.

Email is brilliant at moving information from one person to another. Somewhere along the way, many of us started expecting it to do something it was never designed for: become the permanent archive of our businesses.

So I did something that would once have seemed unthinkable: I deleted the archive. Not because I don't value history, but because I'd realised the history already existed somewhere much better.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised this wasn't really about deleting emails at all. It was about changing habits.

For years I'd been carrying around a decade's worth of messages because I assumed I needed them. The migration simply forced me to confront something that had been true for years: my inbox had become a delivery mechanism, not a knowledge base.

Today, my inbox is exactly what I think it should be: a place for today's conversations, not a permanent archive. At the end of each day I spend a couple of minutes clearing it down. If an email no longer serves a purpose, I delete it. If it genuinely matters, it's almost certainly already been captured somewhere more appropriate.

The biggest benefit hasn't just been a smaller mailbox. It's been the removal of clutter. There's something surprisingly satisfying about opening your email in the morning and seeing only the conversations that actually need your attention, rather than thousands of messages stretching back through the years. It's one less source of mental noise.

It has also made me wonder how many other businesses are still doing things simply because that's how they've always been done.

Email is just one example. Every week we meet organisations relying on spreadsheets where dedicated systems would work better, duplicating information across multiple platforms, or expecting staff to remember where documents are stored because "that's how we've always done it". Those habits weren't bad decisions; they simply made sense at the time and were never revisited.

Technology has changed enormously over the last twenty years. The challenge isn't simply adopting new software; it's recognising when old ways of working no longer serve us. Often, the biggest improvements come not from buying another system, but from making better use of the ones we already have.

For us, the CRM has quietly become the centre of our business. It gives us a complete picture of every relationship, every project and every interaction, ensuring our knowledge isn't trapped in one person's inbox. Email still plays an important role, but it's no longer where our organisational memory lives.

I'm certainly not suggesting everyone should go away and delete ten years of email tomorrow. Every organisation has different legal, operational and regulatory requirements.

But I would encourage every business owner to ask themselves one simple question.

“If you wanted to understand the complete history of a client, supplier or project, where would you look first?”

If your answer is "someone's inbox", it might be time to think differently.