Most families think about the letters at the end. The work is far smaller at the beginning, and the three ways families usually lose a year of correspondence all happen quietly, in the middle, while everything appears to be fine.
This is a short list of things to do once, early, that make the end of the mission a non-event.
Give the letters a label, today
In Gmail, open one of their letters, click the three dots, and choose Filter messages like these. Set it to apply a label with their name on it, and tick Also apply filter to matching conversations so it catches everything already sitting in the inbox.
From then on every letter files itself. It costs five minutes and it is the difference between “export one label” and “export everything and sort it out afterwards”.
Export twice a year, not once at the end
Google Takeout hands you a copy of your mail as a file. Doing it at month six, month twelve and month eighteen means that if anything goes wrong you lose weeks rather than everything. The full steps are here, and after the first time it is about two minutes of clicking.
Watch the storage meter
A free Google account shares 15GB between Gmail, Drive and Photos. A mission’s worth of letters with photographs attached will make a dent in that, and when an account fills up, mail stops being delivered.
The dangerous part is what people do next: sort by size and delete the biggest messages, which are precisely the letters with the pictures in them. If you are close to full, pay for the smallest tier for the rest of the mission. It is a few pounds a month and it removes the decision entirely.
Download the shared albums
Pictures shared as a link are not in your inbox. A Google Photos album link depends on the sharer’s account still existing, which at the end of a mission it may not; a WeTransfer link expires within days.
Whenever a link arrives, download the pictures properly, into a folder with the month in its name. This is the single most common gap in otherwise complete archives.
Ask the others, while it is easy
Grandparents, siblings away from home, a friend who writes every week — their letters exist only in their inboxes. A message now asking them to keep everything, and to run an export before the homecoming, takes a minute. The same request a year later, after a phone has been replaced or an account abandoned, often gets nothing.
The whole list
- Make a label and a filter for their letters.
- Export the mail every six months and store it off the computer.
- Keep the account below its storage limit; pay rather than delete.
- Download shared albums as files when they arrive.
- Ask everyone else who gets letters to keep and export theirs.
None of this commits you to doing anything with the letters. It means that whenever you decide, the material is complete — and a complete record is a very different thing from most of one.