Niamh Ancell, writing for Cybernews, asked me an interesting question recently. The question was: Should you delete your old emails? Is it risky to keep a long and lengthy email history accessible and online? Why or why not?
Most of the guidance I (and others) came up with for the resulting article warned against keeping old emails forever, based on the theory that email often contains massive amounts of personally identifiable information (PII) and bad guys could use that info, even old info, in attempts to impersonate you or hack into your other accounts.
But I’m certainly guilty of keeping tons of old email history around myself. I assume that I’m safer than most in that my email accounts(and various other accounts) are quite secure, with security-key based multi-factor authentication, and I tend not to threaten to kill people ever, so there’s hopefully not a ton of grist for the legal or embarrassment mills hiding in that archived inbox.
But is that the right thing to do? What’s your opinion?
