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?"

Comments

Re:Italian school of driving

[boybaha]

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")..

Kinda Sorta OT

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

but ...

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 ... 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.

It is the "drink" that makes me wonder, sorry :)

Re:One Word

[pHDNgell]

One word: IMAP

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 ...who knows what else. I've got freedom to try whatever I want at any given moment without losing my current or past mail.