I've never deleted a genuine email in my entire life. I've deleted thousands of emails, sometimes in one go, but I've never mentioned 'deleting loads of emails' it's "I deleted a shit load of spam today, it was a fucking boat load, you could feed a third world country!"
Perhaps yes he deleted a lot of spam, but no one on the planet considers them emails. Why would he be any different?
I try to go through and regularly delete emails I don't feel to be important. I archive the ones that I do want to keep, but the rest get deleted. I simply don't need to hold on to things like old conversations with my advisors about registration, emails from Facebook, Twitter, etc. containing updates, random emails amongst friends, and many more. I don't consider those to be spam, and some of them were definitely genuine email for the time, regardless of how you define something ambiguous like "genuine email", but I just don't feel the need to be a digital pack rat. There's a decent chance that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
a lot of places that are subject to FOI requests have policies in place to delete emails more than X months old (where X is given as part of the policy). Keeps costs down more than anything I think - FOI can be very expensive and time consuming (although it is a good thing).
Perhaps yes he deleted a lot of spam, but no one on the planet considers them emails. Why would he be any different?