alt Hacker NewsI remember Urs arguing for this at TGIF quite some time ago. He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear, which was unsustainable.
One outcome of this was to wipe a number of ongoing scientific discussions I was having with external collaborators. I'm used to people having the last 30 years of mail on hand to be able to carry out extremely long, complex projects.
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Good point. To add to that, I hazard a guess that the legal costs are about collecting everything for discovery, and not necessarily about them causing Google to lose legal cases.
> He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear
Uh this sounds cool at first when you say it, but what does it actually mean? Can't he just say legal costs of keeping that email is more than the value of it. How did he derive exponential?
Did they not have the indef label at that time? In any case, at some point your collaborators will leave institutions and thus get a new email address. What happens then?