Mail messages are a controversial topic. Everyone has their own way of maintaining mail messages, and it’s partly a matter of preference and partly habit.

Some people keep mail messages in appropriate directories. For example, if you have a directory containing contracts for the Acme company, you might save all mail from that company in that directory.

Other people just keep mail messages in separate files in their home directory (or a subdirectory thereof). So you’ll have a home directory with files called lost.coat, newproject, adrians.address, etc.

Some people create files for each discrete topic. So all messages about the Christmas party go into a file called party, all messages about the 401k plan go into a file called 401k, etc.

Some of us keep messages in files named after who sent the message (my own preference). So all messages from Tim are kept in a file called tim.

And other people just keep all messages, regardless of the topic or sender, in the mbox file in their home directory.

Sometimes when you’re cleaning your home directory, you might take the time to go through your mail folders and remove the messages you don’t need anymore. But even if you don’t, you can still make a difference by removing the big messages. For example, if Steve sent you a tar archive in email, you’ve probably already untarred it, and you don’t need to keep it in your mail archives. If you save your own messages (which I do; shh, don’t tell anyone), you can weed out the messages you were only forwarding to others, you can remove the 20-page PostScript file you mailed out to your editor, and you can remove the messages reminding your brother about your mother’s birthday.