Alright this is a weird post, but I keep thinking about my data.

As of late I've gotten really concerned about data privacy, and for good reason. Now I've had many emails over the years, as I am sure most of you have as well. Many of which you may have even forgotten about.

Now in the last year Google has been going through some scandals about how they are training AI on your emails, full stop, no ifs/ands/or buts. That is not okay.

Who knows what other providers are doing as well, and all of them (especially gmail and yahoo) are flooding the inbox with ads.

Now I've always personally gone for an inbox zero approach, however I was able to achieve that by archiving or moving to an "important" folder if I was "done" with an email. Over the years that became gigs of data, and while I have enough storage for it. I don't want that to be ai training, nor do I want to some how lose it if Google decides to delete my account or something. Same philosophy I had with books a little while back, Why you NEED to Save your Books, and I had the brilliant idea to move my emails into my Obsidian vault.

Why should you do it?

Not only will they actually be SAFER, with firewall and multiple passwords, but they will be actually useful to me if I need to reference them.

You got to realize that these companies have so much power over you when your data is in their hands. They're also not responsible with it, every month another company gets hacked, and your data is the price.

I also think it is so much more useful to have the data in a place where you are actively interacting with notes.

How to go about it

Firstly, you need a PKM system, which in this case I will be using Obsidian of course.

Now I'm sure there's ways to automate this, or to create a script, but I felt that it needed a personal touch. I had many gigs of emails/images in my gmail alone, and then I went through my yahoo and now today live.

Thousands of emails, but for some of you it may be even more. How can you go through it quickly? Well make sure you have a folder structure in place, both in your email provider, and in Obsidian.

You could organize based on which provider, but I had only saved about 100 chains (outside of my interviewee messages). Thus I only needed one folder.

For all of the guests I had on my shows, they took up at least half of my gmail emails that were saved. I took all of their chats, and put them in their respective notes. This is helpful for context, and for knowing when was the last time I reached out (which I used to have a property for before too).

I did it all by hand, copy and pasting, but the benefit of that is that it pulls the meta data too. I.e. time of email sent, who, and subject line. It can make things cluttered, so sometimes I did delete my own email from the chain once it was in Obsd, which did decrease the overall size. (as in just the emails themselves, not the text below i.e. dustin @ blank .com).

What comes next?

I can't tell you what to do, but if I were you I'd copy all of your important stuff off. Then delete them off of the email servers. Its not worth the risk of keeping it there.

I also went into Google and Meta in particular, and deleted a ton of their tags they had about me for ad targeting. Went in and deleted history, and turned off certain tracking measures. That isn't enough, but while you are deep in your emails you might as well. It also shows you what companies and subscriptions you have had, and so you know what websites to go to in order to which to delete your account with. At least unsubscribe.

This is a simple post today, but I felt compelled to make it. I don't think people are thinking about their own emails as a data source for themselves.