Slashdot Mirror
Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching?
An anonymous reader writes "I have kept every email I have ever sent or received since 1990, with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well). I have migrated my emails faithfully from Unix mail, to Eudora, to Outlook, to Thunderbird and Entourage, though I have left much of the older stuff in Outlook PST files. To make my life easier I would now like to merge all the emails back into a single searchable archive — just because I can. But there are a few problems: a) Moving them between email systems is SLOW; while the data is only a few GB, it is hundred of thousands of emails and all of the email systems I have tried take forever to process the data. b) Some email systems (i.e. Outlook) become very sluggish when their database goes over a certain size. c) I don't want to leave them in a proprietary database, as within a few years the format becomes unsupported by the current generation of the software. d) I would like to be able to search the full text, keep the attachments, view HTML emails correctly and follow email chains. e) Because I use multiple operating systems, I would prefer platform independence. f) Since I hope to maintain and add emails for the foreseeable future, I would like to use some form of open standard. So, what would you recommend?"
An IMAP server (dovecot, cyrus, courier) of your choice for Linux. If you don't have a Linux server you can always run it inside a small VM.
While not open source, Gmail has a good search engine that isn't sluggish. Plus it has roughly 7.5 gigs of space to store data. Use IMAP to push all of your emails to the server and then use that Gmail account for archive email only.
If this is really important to you, and you want it all to work across multiple workstations/OSes, your best bet will be to store it all in IMAP. If you have the means and motivation to run this yourself, I would recommend Dovecot. If you don't have the means and motivation, then you can use a service like Gmail to run your IMAP although you give up certain freedoms in doing so. For example, I use Dovecot coupled with Maildir++ as the physical storage format - as a result I can (if I wanted to) change to any email client I wish very quickly, use different email clients at the same time, etc.