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How Do You Store and Reconcile Email Archives?

Posted by timothy on from the translate-them-to-quipu dept.

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?"

5 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Disk space is cheap. Why bother deleting? by heypete · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Disk space is cheap. Why bother deleting? by Libraryman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why delete?

      Because if you delete early and often, you've committed no crime. If you wait to delete it until someone (feds, cops, *IAA, UN-black-helicopter troopers, whoever) demands you turn it over to them, you're screwed.

      After all, you break laws too (everybody does, they are written that way). You just haven't been caught yet. (I know this because if you had, you wouldn't have all you email archived!)

  2. One Word by Zone-MR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. It's simple: plain text by Faust7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:One word by Padrino121 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.