- What it is
- The plain text of each message you sent, with its date and the person it went to, stored where you can open it.
- How you get one
- You paste the text somewhere of your own before you encrypt it or before you press send, whichever comes first.
- Where to keep it
- In the same offline place as your other order material, one file, appended to rather than reorganised.
- How it goes wrong
- You keep the encrypted version instead of the plain one and end up holding a block you cannot read.
- What fails without it
- Every question about what you actually said becomes guesswork, including your own guesswork about your own words.
- Time to acquire
- Seconds per message, as long as you do it in the same movement as sending rather than afterwards.
You wrote it, so you know what it said
Probably not. Ask anyone to reproduce a message they sent a fortnight ago and you get the gist, some invented politeness, and a confident version of the one detail that turns out to be wrong. Messages about orders are especially bad for this because they are written quickly, they contain identifiers and figures, and they are the exact material somebody will later quote back at you.
The gist is not enough when the disagreement is about whether you gave an address, when you gave it, or which of two things you asked for.
The encryption problem, stated plainly
In the ordinary arrangement, a message you encrypt to somebody else is encrypted for them. You send it, and what remains in your sent folder is a block of ciphertext addressed to a key that is not yours. It is inert. Holding it feels like holding a record and is nothing of the kind.
This surprises people, and it surprises them at the worst time, which is when they go looking for what they wrote. The fix is not clever. Keep the plain text before it becomes ciphertext. That is the entire technique.
What a copy consists of
Date, recipient, and the words. Nothing else is needed and anything else invites editing. Append each one to the bottom of a single file so the order of the file is the order things happened in. Sorting, grouping and folders all sound like improvements and all introduce the possibility of a message ending up somewhere you will not look.
Where the message contains an address or an identifier, the copy inherits whatever care you took with the original. If you copied an address block across, the copy holds the same block, unbroken, exactly as sent. The reasoning behind that is on the address block.
Reading your own file later
The file earns its keep in one narrow situation: somebody tells you what you said, and it does not match what you remember. With the copy, that is a thirty second lookup. Without it, you are negotiating about the contents of your own head, and the more confident party generally wins that.
The second use is quieter. Reading back a message you sent while annoyed is a decent way of understanding why a conversation went the direction it did. That is not evidence of anything, but it is worth having.
How the copies spoil
Copies of your own sent text stay good indefinitely, so this item mostly holds its value. The failures are all at the moment of writing: you skip a message because it seemed unimportant, you save the ciphertext, or you save an early draft rather than the version that actually went. The draft is the sneaky one, because it looks right and is wrong in exactly the places you edited.
One habit removes most of that. Copy at the last possible moment, from the field you are about to send, not from the editor you drafted in.
Where this sits in the pile
Messages, the order record and the window note are three views of the same transaction and are stored together for that reason. The key you used to encrypt in the first place is covered under your own key, and the copy of that key that lives away from your machine is on key backup. The place all of this physically sits is the subject of where things live.
Questions that come up
Can I not just decrypt my own sent messages?
Only if your setup was arranged to encrypt to your own key as well as the recipient's, which is an option in some tools and is off by default in plenty of others. Assuming it is on and discovering later that it was not is the exact failure this page exists to prevent. Test it once on an old message rather than reasoning about what your software probably does.
Do I need to keep messages I received as well?
They are useful, but they are a different item with a different failure mode, because received messages are readable to you by construction and are usually still sitting where they arrived. The sent side is the fragile one. If you are only going to keep half the conversation, keep the half that stops being readable.
Is one long file really better than folders?
For this purpose, yes, in the same way that a single notebook beats a set of loose sheets. A file you only ever append to has no state to get wrong. Folders introduce decisions, decisions get made differently on different days, and eventually something lands in a place that made sense once and is invisible now.