Well, ok, not the email per se, but the way it has turned people into the worst kind of pack rats.
When push comes to shove, and your home desktop computer is absolutely toast...
it's time to burn it and reinstall... what cho gotta do?
You need to save those 4 megs of ms word documents representing your
resume and associated forms. Everything else can be reacquired...
unless you're programmer dude and you need to stash code... but still...
we're talking about a directory you can see, feel, and manage.
Email, on the other hand, is buried in Outlook and when you run an export
- if you actually remember to do an export -
is hundreds of megs... why? because you're backing up every email you
ever wrote, received or deleted... and you have them... because... why?
Do you expect to be investigated by the FBI and have to prove that Edna
sent you that pinko commie recipe for borscht?
Believe me... there is little as liberating as trashing your entire email repository.
I think that email account you get from your ISP... the one you hook into your Outlook...
is the devil. Best case scynario involves only ever accessing that account on a web interface,
and trashing everything in it regularly. Keep it from storing anything on your pc.
This would be why I love hotmail and gmail solutions. My email is not rocket science and I could care less if some bot is trolling through my mail looking for key words to customize advertisements... There are no big honking secrets in email and last time I checked I'm pretty sure I wasn't a secret agent preparing to destabilize governments with my evil email...
... and yes, this is just me blabbing away to kill time waiting for a boss to chat with me. :)