You used the phrase 'junk emails' but it is clear from context and the rest of your remarks that you were not talking about SPAM but rather legitimate emails that you just considered useless junk.

Look at this statement, it would be nonsensical to claim this is referring to ACTUAL junk aka spam email: Pruning spam.

"Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."

"I will never keep an email where someone is alerting me they'll email me later, I'll just wait for that later email. I will never keep an email where someone is asking me to upload stuff to their site, once I upload whatever, they confirm, I delete the email. There's no the value to the email once the upload is done"

Right, emails you subjectively consider useless, but many people are required to keep ALL communications. They are not allowed to decide which are useful and useless. More importantly, you are describing a time consuming process where you spend significant time and worse, mental load, backtracking to determine old LEGITIMATE email is no longer useful. We just calculated a cost under 25 cents a year to simply archive all your email forever. That means if you make $15/hr flipping burgers and spend ONE MINUTE A YEAR managing email you've already exhausted the cost to simply keep all of it.

A lot of developers took a long time fighting your argument, only they were fighting for microoptimizations in code but the math kept crushing them. It's simply far more effective to save the time you'd spend choosing instructions that are slightly faster and instead use that time finding a high level design that is more efficient or timing execution to find the choke points. Email management is only useful to the extent it aids you in finding emails you need.

For YOU. https://slashdot.org/comments....

I answered the legal/compliance point seperately.

"I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 000 000 or 500 000 000 GB of email, which is also 500 PB, a 1/2 EB of email, that is most likely almost worthless. Where do you store 1/2 a EB? Why store 1/2 a EB of effective digital toilet paper? That's just email, now think about photos, videos, and cloud drive usage, if you start cleaning it up, and you're honest, most of that is junk."

Of course most of it is junk but you missed the point. Yes, I said 120 50GB email accounts and you sound like someone stuck dealing with people and their oversized outlook PSTs that crash and clobber their systems to me so I'm sure we can agree that in reality, you'll have some double that and most far smaller. So lets say that is 200 users covered by a $200 drive for 5 years. That is $0.20/user/year... hell lets pad it and call it a quarter a year for the benefit of never deleting an email you need later. At that price it's going to be the right call for 200 people or 10 million people. And that's talking about RAW storage... email is text, not only is text highly compressible but emails are highly redundant text... you only need to store unique blocks on disk if you do it right and the rest will just have references pointing to the same location. Just thinking about emails sent to 20 co-workers and their giant reply chains... how much less that becomes becomes because you only store the novel content once and store pointers for all the repetition across all those mailboxes.

"That's just email, now think about photos, videos"

Personal Photos and videos take up far more space than emails. Emails especially are redundant as well. 1/2 EB of email doesn't require anywhere remotely close to 1/2EB of disk to store.

"There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails."

See the problem with talking out your ass is that you are often wrong. There may be no legal requirement for YOU to retain emails/communications. That doesn't make it some universal truth.

Sure — there are quite a few. Common examples:
Financial services

SEC Rule 17a-4 — broker-dealers must retain electronic communications (email, IM, chat) for 3 years, first 2 in easily accessible storage, in WORM (write-once-read-many) format
FINRA Rule 4511 — similar 3-6 year retention for member firms
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) — public companies retain audit-related communications for 7 years
Dodd-Frank — swap dealers retain communications for 5 years
Investment Advisers Act — registered advisers retain records for 5 years

Healthcare

HIPAA — covered entities retain communications containing PHI for 6 years (longer in some states; CA requires 7, some require until patient age 21+)
CMS / Medicare — claims-related communications retained 7-10 years
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 — pharma/medical device communications related to clinical trials and manufacturing retained for the life of the product plus a period after

Legal / litigation

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — once litigation is "reasonably anticipated," all potentially relevant communications must be preserved indefinitely (litigation hold), overriding normal retention schedules
Attorney-client communications — typically retained 7-10 years post-matter under state bar rules

Tax

IRS — communications supporting tax positions retained 7 years (3-year audit window + extensions); employment tax records 4 years; some indefinitely if fraud alleged
State tax authorities — vary, often 4-7 years

Employment / HR

EEOC — personnel-related communications retained 1-3 years (longer if charge filed)
FLSA — payroll-related communications retained 3 years
ADEA — 3 years for hires, 1 year for other personnel actions
OSHA — workplace safety communications retained 5 years (30 years for certain medical/exposure records)
ERISA — benefits plan communications retained 6 years

Government contracting

FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) — contractor communications retained 3-4 years post-contract
DFARS / DoD contracts — often longer, 6+ years
Davis-Bacon Act — prevailing wage communications 3 years

Energy / utilities

FERC — communications related to wholesale energy transactions retained 5 years
NERC — grid reliability communications retained 3-6 years

Telecommunications

FCC — carrier communications retained 2-5 years depending on category
CALEA — certain surveillance-related records 6+ months minimum

International / cross-border

GDPR (EU) — retention varies by purpose, but documented retention schedules required for all personal data communications
MiFID II (EU financial) — communications retained 5-7 years
UK FCA — similar 5-year retention for regulated firms

Industry-specific

Insurance — state insurance commissioners typically require 5-10 years
Education (FERPA) — student-related communications retained per institutional policy, often 5+ years
Nuclear (NRC) — communications retained for facility lifetime in some cases

Public sector

Federal Records Act — government agency emails are federal records, retention per NARA schedules (varies from a few years to permanent for historical records)
State sunshine/open records laws — public employee communications often retained 3-7 years and subject to disclosure

The retention periods aren't arbitrary — they're tied to statutes of limitations, audit windows, and the practical needs of regulators to investigate after the fact. Most large companies actually retain longer than required as a hedge against litigation discovery, and many implement formal retention/destruction policies specifically so they have a defensible reason for deleting older material when it's no longer required.

"Businesses, it is worse. One lost email can mean a lost sale, or a customer unable to contact you and then resorting to legal means [1]."

This is very real and it almost seemed to happen overnight. Once upon a time as a freelance service tech I had dozens of small business clients who hosted their own email and it just doesn't make sense for a say a cabinet maker with 20 ppl on staff to pay for a T1 when they could have some multiple of the bandwidth and the same uptime from the same provider for a tenth of the price... but every so often they'd get a blacklisted IP or they might even really get some kind of bug and get blacklisted and the time it took to get off those lists grew and grew until eventually you basically couldn't get off the lists.

Luckily those large providers and spam battling champions saved the internet from the evils of people self-hosting email and spam exists no more....

This is an excellent point. Especially because text is highly redundant and they can chunk things up and replace pieces that exist in another email/file with a placeholder to the same raw data rather than replicate things over and over again. Potentially TB's of email can be stored on GB's of disk this way.

"You don't need mass email storage, 99.X% of emails are useless, and should be deleted, for 99.99% of people. If you need more than 5GB of email storage, why? Can you come up with a reason that isn't just fear of losing your horde of garbage? Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."

You are right on the original point but your debunking of 'excuses' falls flat. First the legal requirement to retain email isn't something you can just ignore because you doubt some lawyer will ask for it. Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse. Claiming you'll probably get away with it is not a valid reason for breaking the law.

Also, Gmail was touted as unlimited email with no need to delete, only archive. You can 'star' email as important. I've had my gmail account since the unlimited storage beta and while I don't often dig for old emails it does happen; sometimes even a decade old and the emails I'm hunting for are often emails that I didn't think would be important at the time and therefore did not 'star' as important.

"How much storage could the world recover, is people pruned their fucking emails to stop being landfills? Honestly, how much? It's in the Exabytes, probably."

You could get a shiny new 6TB HDD with 5yr warranty for $200 3yrs ago. That's 120 50GB email accounts. If even one of those 120 people accesses one old email during that half decade the drive has almost certainly paid for itself; that's true even if it just saved them a couple hours finding that data elsewhere. Hardware is CHEAP. Storage is CHEAP. Either is effectively infinitely scalable. Time is not only expensive; it also doesn't always scale.

I remember during the beta when they claimed it was unlimited storage with no need for a delete function and only an archive feature.

Musk founded a non-profit and fully open AI first, remember? Altman and friends hit a point where they felt they had something powerful and decided to keep it closed rather than open it. That's really the end of the discussion to be honest. That he later founded a competing AI [with the openly discussed and disclosed purpose of making sure an ethically responsible AI existed] and it would benefit somehow from suing OpenAI is an irrelevant distraction.

"If you had to not dislike someone to give them a fair trial then every child rapist, murder and other scumbags would walk free every day."

First scumbags do walk free every day and it's better than imprisoning a bunch of innocent people. If you disagree... tough shit, that's our system in the US. Otherwise the people need fear the state when it is the state which should fear the people.

"You only have to show you can provide a view based on the facts not on whether you like the person."

There is no way to show that during jury selection, only a way to fish to out bias that colors your judgement... like disliking the person.

"Simple dislike does not automatically equate to bias."

No, it to doesn't automatically equate to a failure to overcome bias. Dislike is a bias. He's entitled to a jury who is neutral at worst.

Musk has an undeserved negative reputation among a radical political faction which dominates the location. This suggests the judge is likely among that faction. Discovery wouldn't make any moderate or apolitical person dislike him, his actions are generally altruistic... including his basis for suing Altman. Altman on the other hand is disliked for honest reasons... the worst of which are the basis of this case.

like? No. But not dislike either. If they dislike you then it isn't neutral... or since this is a civil matter it should at least be an even spread. Most people are neutral or positive on Musk but not in a heavy blue zone like that. Altman isn't really a public figure outside of tech.

There was never any credible reason to doubt it nor any motive for lying in the first place. A subset of it was codified but definitely not all of it.

"The only way you wouldn't have a negative view of them would be if you've completely disconnected from society"

The only people with a negative view of Musk are left wingers and they are a shrinking minority despite the sad echo-chamber that has grown here on Slashdot.

"It is a jury of your peers. If all your peers hate you, that is a you problem."

Musk doesn't have that problem. A large but vocal minority hates him which is highly concentrated in the place where they are holding the trial and apparently includes the judge.

Faulty analogy. Musk is not a dictator and has not been found to have done anything illegal, immoral, or harmful. He is a politically polarized figure in the sense that half the political spectrum hates him while the other half is neutral to him. Even if your 'for or against' reasoning applied, in a criminal case "for" would be required if we must choose. But this isn't, there is a large population of polarized people who hate Musk... the majority of the population is neutral or mildly approving of him while Altman is not especially favored by anyone. They should be able to find a reasonable jury who aren't opposed to either or move to a jurisdiction where they can.