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How Do You Store and Reconcile Email Archives?
heyitsjustme wants to know how you deal with old email. "I delete most of what I get but keep the stuff from friends and relations as an archive. Unfortunately I have these email archives from the late 80's through today in the form of macintosh, linux and windows mailboxes including AOL 1.0 mailboxes. What does everyone use to archive email across multiple platforms and non-standard mailbox formats? Is there an easy solution out there? Does anyone archive IM?"
Save it all. With the exception of some mail archives lost to catastrophic disk failures (I keep archives for my own convenience, not for any official purposes, so I don't back them up), I keep all my email.
Thunderbird is able to import all my old mail archives (from years and years of Eudora) and search it effectively. If I were inclined to export all my archives from my Mac to my Windows machine, I could use Google Desktop Search to really search through it all.
I delete almost everything, and only save a few very important or personal emails. For those I do keep, I print to PDF, and archive by date and person/subject. It works exceptionally well for me. It is all electronic, takes very little disk space, and keeps the clutter to a minimum, and eliminates most of the cross platform nightmares.
One word: IMAP. If you can read your email using any decent email client, it should support moving it to an IMAP server. If you are using web-based email or some crappy client which can't export emails to a standard/raw format, you'll have to write a script to convert the messages.
Ever since I first got acquainted with e-mail on my Apple IIe in the '80s, I've used e-mail programs that offer plain-text storage as at least an option. It's one of the most universal formats in existence, and can be read one way or another on computers both decades old and brand new. I encountered some weird proprietary clients in the '90s that still stored e-mail in this format, because from a corporate perspective, this stuff was still in its infancy, plus HTML hadn't yet mucked everything up. To this day I still store in plain text from Eudora 6.2.
I burn it to CD-Rs that I know won't get moved around or scratched. They stand a good chance of lasting the rest of my life.
The coolest voice ever.
Almost every email client around can import and export mbox formats. Getting your email in a format that is going to be readable in 20 years is the first step, otherwise why bother?
Worse comes to worst mbox is readable as plain text.
Gmail?
I don't know about you but I generate about 6GB of email archives per year. Besides that having my email potentially available for searching doesn't sit well with me. I'm not sure where it stands now but there were a lot of potential privacy issues with Gmail.
No I don't receive hords of email, just a lot of engineering related with source code,research, white papers attached. If you do anything business related it's important to keep all of the original emails received so there is an electronic paper trail.
Combine this with spotlight/tiger in mac os. Spotlight indexes PDF content. print it to pdf and it will be searchable. Assuming you have a Mac that is.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That way it won't be subject to a sub poena. You'll regret it one day if you don't. Do you realize how much incriminating stuff you have in there?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.