Spring Cleaning #29: Email

I have been keeping my email pretty much under control. I get very few personal messages through my work email. At the beginning of each month I review my emails and delete anything that I think is no longer necessary to keep. I review my address book periodically and delete old contacts.
This is all true of my Outlook email. However, when I am off work or away on library business, I use webmail. This is the one where I dropped the ball. Although I had already cleaned this up by the time this exercise came along, it is an example of not keeping up with maintenance. I know in Outlook that deleting an email doesn't really get rid of it. I still have to go into my deleted messages folder and delete again to really purge them. Knowing this I can't imagine why I didn't think to do the same thing with webmail. I have used it on the occasions mentioned for a few years now. Over the Christmas holidays I was checking my email from home one day and actually focused on the fact that there was a Trash folder! When I clicked on it, every email I had read and deleted through webmail over the past few years was sitting in my Trash! There were a few thousand messages! I purged them and am now conscious of the appropriate handling of my webmail email as well as my Outlook email.