Comment by mantra2

I have, but very rarely. I could count on one hand how often I’ve needed to dig back more than half a decade ago.

Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.

I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.

Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.