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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?"

3 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RETARD MODERATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    It's not troll, but I fail to see how it's informative or interesting. It offers no actual advice, the OP asked for a software solution for storage and klingens replied with a transport protocol. I'd say it's borderline -1 offtopic and definitely -1 worthless.

  2. Re:RETARD MODERATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A post suggesting a FOSS DB based solution got modded down too. Children at play with moderator points ...

  3. Re:RETARD MODERATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You got modded funny cuz the only insightful part of your post is how much masturbation you linux-weenies do on this site. What year was the Year of Linux again?