Just curious. . . anyone have any idea approximately how long most of the major email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) keep 'Sent' and 'Received' email on their servers before it gets purged/deleted?
I just checked my gmail account. My oldest email received is from 14 Sep 2004. The oldest in my Sent Items is from 15 Sep 2004.
Tom, I can't tell from your post whether or not you want them to disappear, LOL! If you want to have some control, its really easy to backup your email activities into a file you can save on an external drive or similar. I do that with my "real name" email account. Maybe every two months or so I backup my entire emailbox. The file is not that large considering I have many attachments. Lots of free software to accomplish the task. As Mirimir suggested one post above this one, they control when stuff disappears. No thanks, I think I'll keep control and archive things that are important to me.
I have an email account from mail2world. The oldest email I have is from 2005 I think. They do keep the emails but they sometimes delete attachments. One time I was trying to download an old attachment and it wouldn't let me.
I think there are two answers to your question. On their servers, I'd guess they will keep them until you delete them. Unless of course they have a policy stating otherwise. As to how long they keep them internally, well I'd guess servers are backed up on a very frequent basis. So then you have to ask how long they keep backups. Given the cost of storage and the resources of Google, it wouldn't surprise me if they kept them forever. All just a guess though as I don't use gmail or any other major email provider.
A little off-topic, but IPFS works well enough for storage. If it's something that enough other users want.
