Where do deleted e-mails go?

Sorry folks! I am ever so late in maintaining my blog. Someone e-mailed me this questions a few days ago, but I had deleted it. I found it today, so I guess I can answer it.

Deleted e-mails (let's call them "dead" e-mails, ok?) actually remain for years. They are like the wind, and water and in-laws -- once created, 99.749% keep hanging around. Of course you should all remember that 74.56% of the statistics we read today are made up, and another 8.2% of those remaining are incorrect, but that's another subject.

Where was I? Oh yes, dead e-mails. When you receive an e-mail, it arrives at your computer (or Blackberry, iPhone or whatever little clever new device you are trying to figure out how to work); you read it, and then you usually delete it. Deleted e-mails, are not yet dead. They are sort of like in a coma and their puny life is being maintained by an e-mail life-support system. On a Macintosh, this area is called the "Trash," but on a PC, it has many confusing names, and Microsoft legal will not allow me to tell you what they are. After a few years of collecting dead e-mails, you will discover your computer is full, and you will contact someone technical, and they will tell you that you should have double-deleted your comatose deleted e-mails long before now, and then they will give you all the secret codes and spells to do so.

Once you have deleted your deleted emails, they are now officially dead. BUT they can still be resurrected by any run-of-the-mill hexideci shaman. They will begin to decay, slowly (the e-mails, not the shaman) -- usually they lose their soft tissues first, like their vowels. The harder consonants are the last to go, and they can remains for hundreds of years.

In some places, like California, many people recycle their emails -- sorting the different letters into plastic containers. Once full, they take them to their local Safeway grocery store and empty them into bins. Despite these efforts, the world is still running short of many characters -- commas and the numerals 3 and 7 are still in abundant supply. Many people in third-world countries do not have enough letters to even make a complete sentence, and their children are sent out in to the filthy streets to gather up discarded letters and symbols. A single clean @ sign can often be sold for enough money to feed a family of 4.6 people until they are hungry again. If everyone would recycle e-mail, the whole world would benefit, and we could go back to forwarding all our friends as many virus threats and naughty jokes as we wanted.