Delete them, the only thing I will loose, is the possibility to calculate my money invest in poxnora. Better not to know.
I will be one of the few people that will indeed miss my messages including the trading messages, though there is no reason for you to keep the messages. For context, there were a lot of messages with various people in and about trades, ideas, designs, tournaments, and what not within my own messages, but I am kind of an email hoarder (I don't delete any of my emails either, though I do read them all, though they do serve their own purpose in that matter as well). In short, feel free to remove all of the messages, if it makes life easier for all of you. I would also say it may be time to try to revamp how guild and trader messages work as well.
Thanks for all the feedback. When the site comes up, *all* messages older than 1 year (to err on the safe side) will have been removed. Additionally, in a near future patch, we'll probably remove any unarchived messages older than a month and implement a script that will do the same on an ongoing basis. These initial purges need to be done manually due to their size.
There are some special messages I'd like to keep and I imagine others feel the same. They might be funny emails or the award emails from devs or things along those lines. I also had a few "I owe you the XYZ runes I borrowed" that help avoid awkward situations when you ask for them back. If you had a function where these needed to be saved to a specific archive folder within a certain time period (say, two months), and everything else gets purged on a daily basis once it's X days old, I'd say that would be a nice compromise solution that automatically frees up space to avoid bloating. However, if you need to do purges, do it. Let the players know so we can archive stuff offsite, though. If you change the rules, players will adapt. The important thing is to give them time to adjust. In this case, if you didn't, you'd get lots of "I lost my most prescious message treasure" stuff flooding your inbox.
I believe that those messages that are in the archive, will be archived and saved, but everything else, will be cleaned regularly, say after 3 months of staying in the inbox?
Yeah. Other than the initial purge I mentioned, the idea would be anything in archived would be saved indefinitely. That said, to avoid a scenario in which this feature could be abused by archiving everything, we might place a limit (say 500 messages) on how many messages could be archived.
Ha, burn them. Maybe give the player an option to download everything to one giant .txt hunk before it gets sent over the Jordan
