When I worked at Rockwell-Collins, I habitually made PDFs of my e-mails. I tried to do it every month. And then I would e-mail the PDF to my home account, because people sent me e-mail at work all the time, and that way I kept all my correspondence.
But the practical upshot of all this is that I have little snapshots of what my life was like at the time the e-mails were written. It's better than a diary or journal, too.
...and Lord I can't believe what I was dealing with.
My boss was micro-managing me: I had to send her e-mails informing her when I arrived and when I left every day. (And I don't think I was the only person who was doing that, either.) So the PDF is full of no-body e-mails with one-word subjects to the bitch--"here" and "leaving"--sometimes with a sentence or two of body to amplify the subject.
The August 2001 file discusses the severe stomach cramps which sent me to the doctor one afternoon--cramps so bad the doc did an EKG to make sure it wasn't my heart. (It wasn't.) The doc gave me Nexium on the theory it was GERD, but it wasn't GERD--it was just my stomach twisting itself into knots due to stress.
"I once had a large income and a larger ulcer; I now have a small income and no ulcer." Heinlein, Have Space Suit--Will Travel.
...except that I didn't have a "large" income, except relative to where I am now. I'm not sure it's worth it. If I'd been making double what I was making, maybe then it would have been worth it; but in the months that followed my being laid off in the wake of 9/11, I realized that that job had been killing me...and what I should do, every time I start bemoaning the fact that I lost that job, is to look up the old e-mail archives and remind myself why it's probably a good thing I lost that job.