But email doesn’t have to be so stilted, so burdensome. And it often isn’t. Beneath the flurry of falsely friendly correspondence and the exclamation points, many of of our inboxes house their own Chambers of Secrets. And on days when I down the particular cocktail of nostalgia and self loathing instead of something sensible, like coffee, I climb through my inbox to that forbidden zone, where shards of my past emotional state live on in saccharine all-caps exclamations and sweet sentences. Or, as I call them, the Ex Files, where all the emails with my exes are preserved. With my high school boyfriend, elaborate nicknames in all-caps and minute updates from summers apart, spent visiting far-flung family. With my most recent ex, a string of Google calendar invites for dates and pat responses to my long-winded notes using Gmail’s suggested phrases (I should have known, I should have known).