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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?"
I use the basic Unix mail format, essentially plain text series of messages. Eudora does fine with it; and most anything else can read/import it. I have email going back to the 80's in this format. The one time I had to convert was when I was working for a company that used "Quickmail" on the Mac. I wound up reverse engineering their format and hacking up a program to convert it to plain text.
I also have email archives that stretch back to the early-1990s. I pretty much still have every email I've ever sent or received. When upgrading email clients, I often migrate my archives with me, converting them using whatever client's built-in importing and exporting functions I have available. I went from Eudora to Outlook Express to Thunderbird to Mac Mail. I also have programs that "pop" webmail off their sites (gmail, hotmail and yahoo) to consolidate them in whatever current mail client I'm using. I just keep them in neat folders ("Old Eudora Mail," "Old Yahoo Mail")..
but ...
... just wondering as the Submitter did what i like /. Submitters to do: make me think and look for new, better stuff ... or better ways to do old-stuff.
:)
Along these lines, is there an OSS package that can read the varied formats the Submitter is referring to, tag and drop them in a DB with a nice, friendly, web-enabled (secure) front-end for searching?
My former employer kept *all* of his email from the last 20 years in tar.gz files. Let's just say it wasn't easy to find an email from er, 15 years ago very easily.
Is there a package that can read the mbox, the other box-formats, plain text, pull from pop, old tar.gz bundles, categorize (sorta), tag and make such things searchable?
Totally a shot in the dark here, i'm not a mail guy at all
It is the "drink" that makes me wonder, sorry
I never keep emails, or archive IMs or any other form of communication. Once a email is read, it is deleted. Same goes for normal old-skool mail, I read it and then trash it. The only exceptions are of letters/email of some importance such as information I need to keep handy, or if it has some kind of sentimental value (letters from deceased relatives for example.)
Sure, HDD space is cheap; but I tend to equate people who archive every single form of written communication to those who have an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, in that they hoarde everything in sight: newspapers, snail mail, magazines, boxes, etc..
Commit to memory and destroy the evidence. Thats my way of handling archives.
One word: IMAP
...who knows what else. I've got freedom to try whatever I want at any given moment without losing my current or past mail.
Absolutely. I use no fewer than two mail clients on two different machines on any given business day. Every email I've sent since 1995 or something like that, and received since 1998 is available and searchable. Over this time, I've accessed this archive with the following clients:
* pine (lots of pine)
* mac mail
* thunderbird
* various netscapes/mozillas
* ML (some random IMAP reader)
* My phone (my old Sony/Ericcson speaks IMAP)
* My palm (two different apps)
* python
* a java webmail system I wrote
* three or four other webmail systems
* mutt
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
I have several CDs worth of stuff archived with ForKeeps:
http://www.fkeeps.com/whofor.htm
It's a bit of an old program and the interface is clunky, but it works reasonably well once you work through it.
--Steve