Pot, kettle, black

I don’t have a storage unit (unless you count my parents’ basement back east), but if e-mails were hard copies, I could fill a small-town library with my messages. This is not, under normal circumstances, a problem. But when I made the move to Mac, I had to use Outlook2Mac to get all my Outlook e-mails over to Mail. The bulk of it was easy enough—I got all my work e-mails transferred pretty quickly. Where I ran into trouble was with all my personal messages, primarily the 11,256 e-mails (I am not exaggerating) that I have sent to or received from my boyfriend over the past four and a half years.

It started innocently enough: Every frickin’ e-mail when you’re infatuated with someone is loaded with meaning and sentimentality, and you don’t want to let any of that slip through the cracks. But somewhere along the way, communication becomes less about proclaiming your undying love and describing precisely what you’ll do to him when you see him, and more about “See you at 1?” or “OTD” (short for “out the door”). And yet, when you’ve started saving every message you send and receive, where do you draw the line? Apparently, if you’re me, you don’t.

And so when it took Outlook2Mac one week to export all those messages, I figured it must just be a crappy program—it didn’t occur to me that maybe, just maybe, I’d gone too far. In fact, it wasn’t until I tried to import the messages into Mail and found that Mail was forced to “close unexpectedly” (three times in a row) that I started to think, “Maybe this is a bit much.” So have I culled through them and saved only the best? No. I’ve broken down my e-mails by year—2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007—and I’m importing one year at a time.

Maybe I’ll go through them and delete the messages that don’t make me cry. That could be a good line in the sand. Tears, save it. Anything else, delete.