I can't answer your question. I can only tell you what I did. Now first of all, I didn't have any loving, caring emails, or messages from him. They were all nasty. If there were actually times that he was caring, he spoke to me. So I had about 10 journals, many texts, emails, voice mails, and I also had recorded 2 fights with him.
At first I kept them because if I ever felt the urge to talk to him, or to hear his voice, I would listen to the vms and the tapes. That sure did the trick of getting my hands off of the phone so that I could hear his "sweet, loving voice?"
All of the texts, emails, and the journals, I did read them for quite some time. The journals didn't contain anything close to happy. I just wrote on the days that I was hurting, and I kept a stroke tally of the days that he wasn't verbally attacking me, and the day was somewhat peaceful.
The last year that I was there, he was somewhat of a decent person to me for 25 days out of 365.
On my 2nd anniversary of divorce (I was married to him for 27 years, I took all of my journals and I burned them. I didn't want to read them anymore, I didn't even look at them for about a year then, and they were just taking up space, and I didn't want to see them anymore.
The rest of the stuff, the text messages and voice messages are not on my current phone, they are on a different one, I guess I don't even know if I could still listen to them or read the texts, because I don't have that phone number anymore. The emails are in a different email account, I don't go there. The recorder, I still have it somewhere, but I haven't a clue as to where I put it. I know that I will never go back there and listen to them, or read them anymore, and I guess if I really thought about it to delete it, this might set me back and I might look back. My hands start to shake at even the thought of signing into my email account. If I ever do find that cell phone and the recorder they will go into the trash immediately.