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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."
Had the same need 20 years ago when migrating from VAX/VMS to Unix. The old emails were saved in a not quite readable format, but I figured I could recover them if necessary. In the end, never bothered. Yes, there are a few (actually, only two) that I'd like to resurrect now, but life moves on.
I'm a big fan of throwing together a DB when I want to store things categorically like that and want fast searches. If you are up to the task, hunt down some tools/roll your own so that you have a nice relational database and some stored procedures for getting what you want when you need it.
You could export your emails to some parsable format, write an importer to extract the basics that you want to keep (from/to/subject/body,attachments/entire binary blob/etc) and then bulk insert that mess into on a mysql/sql server tucked away somewhere locally or "in the cloud" (EC2, Azure). Just another option as I'm sure you'll see here many here. At least with this route you are in full control of how you index, what you can search, encryption, performance, level of backups, etc. Maybe not the best way for some but I know if I had over 100000 emails that I wanted searchable very very quickly with advanced SQL like searching, this would be a cool way to do it (time permitting). Good luck! And to the pedantry to ensue...Yes. Good day.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
It's kind of like photos, you know? Or letters, and such. People like to store those things, because they serve as a memory aid for what the mind no longer holds. It is also quite useful for history reconstruction/when you are old and have nothing else to do but a box full of photos/letters/etc.
Not to say that you are wrong on your point, except on the weird part. Unless you are okay with double standards, or you also consider anybody who keeps photos of parties/graduations/etc weird... Just saying.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
But why would I waste time manually finding and copying individual emails, when I can just let the backup script archive them all for virtually no cost?
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