Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best (or Better) Ways To Archive Email?
An anonymous reader writes: I've been using email since the early '90s and have probably half a million emails in various places and accounts. Some of them are currently in .tar files, others in the original folders from obsolete or I-don't-use-them-anymore mail clients. Some IMAP, some POP3. You get the picture. I don't often need to access emails older than a year or two, but when I do, I have found that my only hope for the truly archived ones is to guess what Grep combo might find the right text in the file ... and then pick through the often unformatted, unwrapped, super ugly text until I find the email address or info that I'm searching for. Because of this, I tend to at-all-costs leave emails on servers or at least in the clients so that I can more easily search and find.
My question is whether there's any way to safely store them in a way that I can actually use them later, offline, in a way that allows for easy date searches, email address searches, and so on. Thunderbird for example has 'Archive' as an option, but if I migrate to a different client I assume that won't work anymore. So what ways to people archive emails effectively? Or is this totally a lost cause and I should keep limping along with grep?
My question is whether there's any way to safely store them in a way that I can actually use them later, offline, in a way that allows for easy date searches, email address searches, and so on. Thunderbird for example has 'Archive' as an option, but if I migrate to a different client I assume that won't work anymore. So what ways to people archive emails effectively? Or is this totally a lost cause and I should keep limping along with grep?
I've been using email since the early 1980's, 1982 specifically. I was using "mail" then, later mailx, later whizbang graphical clients.
I still have tar archives of emails from a PDP-11. I can still read them today. Why? Because open formats. Tar archives from the dawn of time can still be read on a modern Linux system today. Once you start locking things up in proprietary formats such as used by Outlook, it gets harder to read them once that format dies. Not impossible, but certainly a bigger PITA.
Tar will probably still be here long after I am gone, so from my POV it is a format with suitable longevity. The underlying messages were encoded in plain old (mbox, I think) mail format, which is also still readable by modern mail clients, and even if it wasn't, it's plain old ASCII, so "less" would suffice in a pinch. Stay away from weird binary / closed formats!
I had a client who insisted he needed to keep every email forever. I thought he was full of shit until he explained to me why.
He works as a vendor rep, helping them sell shit to a well-known Fortune 50 retailer.
As it turns out, this Fortune 50 company periodically audits years old (like sometimes 5+ years) invoices and receiving information and arbitrarily decides "we just realized that shipment you sent us in 2009 was short, but we paid the invoice in full. So we're going to subtract the overpayment -- plus interest -- from the current amount we owe you."
Part of this guy's job was the ability to get the shipping/receiving info as it happens, and the old email lets him present info that basically says "you said it was a complete shipment in 2009, so no deductions".
What I found kind of amazing was that somehow this retroactive auditing is considered acceptable. My guess is vendors are just expected to eat it or not get their product on the shelves.