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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."
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.
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.