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Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Archive and Access Ancient Emails?
An anonymous reader writes "I started using email in the early 90s and have lost most of that first decade due to ignorance, botched backups, and so on. But since about 2000, I've got most — if not all — of my email in some form or other. I run Linux, so this has mainly been in a mix of various programs: Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird. The past 2-3 years are still on the IMAP servers. My problem is that I only rarely NEED to look back to email of 5 years ago. But sometimes it's nice. Or I just want to reminisce about something...or find an old attachment that I was sent. But I do not want to be clogging my current email client of choice with vast backups and even more, I don't know if it will even easily convert. The file structures are different, some are mbox, others maildir, etc., and I would ideally like a way to 1) store and archive these emails, 2) access them, and 3) search by Sender, Subject, Date, Attachments. Is there anything I can do or do I just have to keep legacy applications on hand for this? Should I keep trying to upgrade and pull old files into the new applications? Any help or suggestions about what YOU do would be great."
You don't need all those e-mails. Keep the few you actually care about (copy and paste the text into a regular file, and save any attachments you want), and get on with your life.
People that keep every e-mail are weird. Quit living in the past.
So can anyone with a subpoena. And you can bet Google would be running their advertising stuff on that.
There is no way I would put my life on a public server like that.
As soon as gmail made IMAP available, everything went there. I used to get my stuff via POP and saved it all going back to the early 90s. When IMAP went live on gmail, I let it chug away for hours and hours until it was synced and all my archived stuff was stored on my gmail account. They've been bumping up the limit faster than my mail's built up so I'm now at 3.9 gigs used of 10.1 available, holding about twenty years of email. I have email clients on a desktop and couple laptops that I fire up every couple of months to sync with gmail and keep local stores in the event that google screws up and loses my data. (I like to think I'd be smart enough to disconnect from the internet before accessing the local clients if my gmail account ever went blank but I've got multiple copies just in case I forget.)
I know that won't work for email fiends who pile up a gig a month but it works for me. I don't even bother sorting my email any more. It's faster to just search. Not like the old days when it would take my email client half an hour to slog through all the messages. :)
This.
I fired up imap servers for all my old mail.
I fired up a modern mail client (OSX Mail.app) and connected to all of 'em and also to gmail.
I dragged all my old email into gmail. In a GUI. And it worked.
Done.
I no longer run mailservers. Too much of a headache. gmail is awesome (with imap access, even). Indexing, instant searching, etc.
If you don't want/trust your email to the cloud, then this isn't for you. Unless you want to run your own imap server with whatever backend suits you - then you can dump it all there. I just can't be bothered to manage that after 15+ years of doing so.
This. Don't be a data hoarder. Go through them if you must and re-mail the best/important ones. Then dump it to dev/null and move on.
Do the same with movies, books, bookmarks, photos, apps, docs, etc. you'll be happier without all that baggage. Music of course is another story. Keep that forever and only toss out the dreck (those extra songs on that album you bought because singles didn't exist yet).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I'd say follow the same rules as any archiving of media:
:)
Pick one format and migrate all of your messages to that: In this case, I'd say mbox. Thunderbird and most other mail programs read it and you can get most of your mail into mbox format via IMAP/Thunderbird from whatever mail client can read your old ones. You can store your mbox files locally in Thunderbird and gain Thunderbird's searching (for instance) without the need for an actual back-end. I was able to read some mail stored in Netscape Mail because it was just mbox files and opening them in Thunderbird was a breeze.
Most importantly: Every 5-10 years, re-evaluate your storage choice. Is Thunderbird still around? Is mbox still pretty well regarded? If you find you need to migrate again, do it! If both are still active / supported, then hold onto 'em. The only way to perpetually maintain media access is to make sure your choices are still valid on a regular basis. This is true for any media: As the old formats go obsolete (cassette tape, VHS), you need to migrate that data to the next readily accessible format (CDs, DVDs; FLACs, MPEG(?)).
I think the biggest problem is that you have a mish-mash of stored files right now. You'll save yourself a headache in the future by tearing the band-aid off now and taking the time to get all of your mail into one format. Then, in the future, when you need to convert, it'll be many steps easier since you won't have to visit Slashdot and find out what to do about your mail again next time.
I agree with that for new emails, but for an archive file, none of it really applies. File system corruption and fat fingers should be handled by just restoring from backup, and merging / marking as read / etc is not really applicable for old mail, which should be accessed by either viewing it readonly or making a disposable copy.
mbox might have its problems, but I don't think there's any good reason to spend time converting old files to Maildir.
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Archive old emails by year:
Archives/2013
Archives/2012
Archives/2011
Archives/2010
Archives/2009
Only search in the appropiate ones. Easy, right?
The problem is that a throwaway email might become critically important later on. There is no way to know in advance what is important and what is not.
True story: while deployed in the Army, our communications guy could not find a piece of equipment which was very important and very pricey. He had been signing the monthly inventory forms saying he had it, assuming it was in a cabinet. He could not find any paperwork showing it was signed out - it had just disappeared sometime in the last 3 months and no one had seen it.
On a long shot, I started searching my email - since I keep every last one. Sure enough, about 2 months prior, there was a throwaway email from him to the effect that he was going to turn in item X for repair since it was acting flaky. He checked at the contractor mentioned in that email, and it was sitting on the shelf waiting for pickup.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.