>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.

At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.

I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.

I don't recall any kind of retention limits at Microsoft, at least not for engineers. My mail archives went all the way back to my hire date even 15 years later.

When I worked at Capital One there was a policy of automatically deleting everything that had not been subpoenaed as soon as it was legal to delete it. Usually 3 years or so. Retaining longer was viewed as creating legal risk for future lawsuits. They didn't want to leave evidence lying around if they could help it.

Edit: We were on GSuite.

My company moved to a 3 year retention for legal purposes a few years ago. Somewhat annoying from a nostalgia point of view when I’d get mails pop up from 2095, but everything I need has been in jiras for the last 10 years.

No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.

I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.

Copilot search is great for searching SharePoint

I came back to reread this last sentence three times. Well done, sir, well done!

In my experience it is. Unless your IT leadership blew it on Sharepoint governance, which isn't MS's fault.

Yet Sharepoint remains slow garbage.

I mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time.

But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.

Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.

Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.

Not even counting Sharepoint syncs...