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This article presents the authors' views on archiving e-mails. This summer, after years of procrastination, I finally got around to archiving my e-mail--3 years' worth. Some tell me I am nuts for even keeping the stuff. They say e-mail is so of the moment, so spontaneous and so ephemeral that once it is done, it is done. I admit it. I am an incurable pack rat. But at least no one can accuse me of not being Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. Once I got my e-mail archive built, I naturally started playing around with it to see what it could do. Just by running a few simple reports, I quickly saw some interesting patterns. Not to make too much of a trivial anecdote, but at the end of this little summer project, I find myself at the confluence of librarianship and knowledge management. Prior to this exercise, I might have said that I did not see the point in archiving both pre-prints and post-prints of research papers, let alone backing up and preserving the data and documents that go with the reported research. I still wonder if it is not too much to keep. And I still ponder how long any of it will remain kept. But I do have more appreciation for the value of keeping it all, rather than archiving just the parts we think are best. My hat is off to those of you who build digital archives for a living, to those of you who make the search machines that are capable of isolating treasures in large data dumps, and to those of you who are developing the analytical and visualization techniques capable of extracting meaning from, dare I say, nothingness.