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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?"
You say that like its a bad thing. People with OCD are great at giving oral sex.
Please. It's never "vitally important"; no-one will die if you don't. I wonder how much difference your "vital demographic analysis" has actually made to anything, ever.
I am trolling
When I run events, I need to be able to post-hoc review all of the correspondence for demographic analysis, often done two years after the event when the final reports are being written. Saying that this sort of behavior is odd, or not normal is either being a troll, or not understanding how the world works when you're not just a drone.
This sort of behavior is odd and not normal. If you want to keep your email, then that's fine, but thinking that it's "vitally important" is odd and I think without question points to some "OCD with some component of Aspberger". If you don't then maybe you need to re-evaluate. I am however interested in how you pull demographic analysis out of emails? I mean, hopefully you're not suggesting that you go and chomp on the text to pull out fields of data?
IMO, this is one of the best Slashdot questions ever, and I am greatly anticipating hearing some good answers, especially if they don't include suggesting GMail as a panacea,
I think that GMail could be the panacea here. I mean, if you're just trying to make sure it lasts and you can search it with ease, then GMail can do it better than you can.
You'll have that sometimes...