Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching? 385
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?"
It's obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Alphabetically!
Re:It's obvious - Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
(only half kidding)
IMAP (Score:5, Informative)
An IMAP server (dovecot, cyrus, courier) of your choice for Linux. If you don't have a Linux server you can always run it inside a small VM.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Kmail for Outlook stuff and Search. (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
++ the above, or Evolution - it also imports PST's and from there you can move it to Thunderbird for Windows. If you want uber searchability you could then upload the whole shebang to a gmail account that you sync offline via gears.
I personally would balk at having all that stuff online with google but hey that would be the best searchable option I know. You can also sync with your Gmail account via imap protocol if gears and the web interface is not for you. Problem with that is that you will lose the grea
MySQL (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The guy mentioned entourage. If he is running MacOS he can run any of these on MacOS.
This solves the "storage" problem. However, this does not solve the search/index/etc problem. I have 9G+ and growing IMAP store going back to 1999 with several hundred of folders in it so I am facing a similar problem. Using Thunderbird search and even grepping it on the server just does not cut it any more.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Any
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No way to archive Entourage data with Spotlight.
Actually, there is:
Using Spotlight to search Entourage. [mvps.org]
Re: (Score:2)
For storage, IMAP is definitely the way to go.
I'm using Cyrus myself for this exact purpose (e-mail from the last 7 years about; estimate 20 GB worth of mails; I have many mails that come with attachments). No specific reason to use that one; seemed to be the easiest to set up at the time; it works fine for me.
Main reason for me to use an imap server is that it is client-independent, and as it's open source it's not some weird proprietary format. So great to store mails, easy to retrieve mail remotely, ea
Re: (Score:2)
Re:IMAP (Score:4, Informative)
Seconding this. I've been using Dovecot with Maildir on EXT3 for the last few years--my mailbox is about 25k messages, which I keep all in a single folder and use IMAP tags to organize into different virtual folders, much like Gmail's system but without the privacy concerns.
Dovecot's supplementary indexes makes everything extremely fast (tags, dates, etc), and anything it doesn't catch Thunderbird does, I can search my entire mailbox for a single word in less than a second. I lose my Thunderbird indexes whenever I move to a new computer, but that's just a matter of leaving the client up for a few hours.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I am using dovecot and thunderbird, and have about 60 "live" folders, some with 10's of thousands of messages (a couple with 150+k messages). It is a constant battle with thunderbird, which often goes away for long periods of time, even when not doing anything one would expect to be dealing with the larger folders.
I'm working on some scripts to archive messages into 30-90-180 day archive folders to keep the live folders down to a manageable size, but it would be nice to find something that already exists..
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RETARD MODERATION (Score:5, Funny)
Parent is +informative and/or +interesting, not troll. Fucking brain dead moderators these days. Sheesh.
it suggested a linux solution and made the windows weenies realize how useless their os is. by extension they realized how tiny their penises are and then they finally understood why they like Micro Soft because it describes them perfectly. so they got mad and said "i'll mod it down, yeah, that'll teach them a lesson and make me feel like a real man again!"
Re:RETARD MODERATION (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, IMAP servers are platform independent, as they can run on OSX, Windows, Linux, BSD, and almost any other popular OS I can think of. It's just that Linux distros are common, easy to set up, and light enough on resources that they would be easy to set up in a VM, and without the licensing costs of OSX or Windows, it becomes price comparable to lesser solutions.
I know it's a lot to ask these days to get people to read the comments that they are replying to, but maybe, just maybe, someone complaining about a lack of reading comprehension should take more time to read.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do you know what imap is? He's gonna have to have some central storage thing but the mail access is platform independent..yeah if he wants his imap server to be his own than he'll have to pick one os to serve from but every nonshit mail application has imap support from desktop to mobile and hands down gives him what he wants if he takes the time to organize and set it all up
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As anyone who actually uses IMAP can tell you, it bogs down quickly on large mailboxes, violating the poster's requirement about b)
Not true. Not absolutely false, either. IMAP is an access protocol, not a storage or indexing mechanism, and there is nothing inherent in IMAP that dooms it to be slow in handling large mailboxes. Different combinations of client and server, configurations, and mailbox content and usage can make huge differences in performance. Tens of thousands of messages in a single IMAP folder on a memory-lean server that uses Maildir storage on a UFS or ext2 filesystem with atimes enabled is going to suck horribly, es
Delete (Score:2, Insightful)
Time to delete them all
DO NOT DELETE. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't tell you the number of times I nearly deleted my archived data, going back to 1997 in my case, not just e-mail either.
Then I got falsely accused of everything except 9-11 as part of a separation / child custody battle that started with a nuclear attack out of the blue.
It is amazing how much of that old data is relevant in such cases, "He did x on 1st June 2000 at our house!" and you have data showing you were 200 miles away doing something you had completely forgotten, with someone you haven't spoken to or seen for 7 years, at the time...
DO NOT DELETE YOUR ARCHIVES, EVER!***
*** unless of course you are a bad person and they incriminate you, in which case you'd better avoid everyone else who archives data.
Re:DO NOT DELETE. (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus no one is 100% squeaky clean. Maybe you admitted you were speeding to someone. Maybe you bought porn website memberships (which could be spun as the reason for a break up, or that you are an unfit parent). Maybe you admitted you were a little too drunk to drive but did it anyway. Maybe you ordered a set of army knives and have the receipt and that gets spun as you have weapons all over the place that could endanger the kids....
Anyway just saying that too many records could bite you too. Especially if someone from court gets an order for all of them. Then they can be pulled out of context and could be very damaging. Even medical issues could be in the e-mail archives from correspondents with doctors, confirmations of appointments, etc... If that data ever got out it could be damaging to buying insurance as well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A Lawyer's Fantasy ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have kept every 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) ...
You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
The OP should give some very serious thought to the wisdom of keeping all that email. It may be relatively harmless (I'll wager he's not in a position where his correspondence is likely to be of interest to potential litigants), but dude, hoarding is a disease. Seek treatment.
Meanwhile, look for something that uses IMAP style storage and a database for indexing purposes. Be prepared for a laborious process of importing and i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true. ;-)
We've won a couple lawsuits because I save all of my email.
We had a contract to do a workshop with Maricopa County - the same people whose Sheriff is under investigation by the FBI right now, and of Immigration Law fame. And who have a lot of other shady things going on right now, but I digress.
I'd traded a series of emails with them planning the workshop. Everything was all set. Then, about a week before the workshop, they say they don't need me to c
Google Mail. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What about the privacy of those you email with? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Much (Score:2, Informative)
It isn't particularly platform independent (because no one is paying much attention to Windows), but Not Much offers threads and full text search:
http://notmuchmail.org/ [notmuchmail.org]
Re:Not Much (Score:4, Informative)
+1
Notmuch can manage absolutely insane amounts of email without any artificial 'archiving'. Of course, if you are looking for a a program that does something else than tagging and searching (like sending, composing or receiving email), you need to look elsewhere.
Print (Score:5, Funny)
Print then scan
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ [ollydbg.de]
Gmail? (Score:5, Informative)
While not open source, Gmail has a good search engine that isn't sluggish. Plus it has roughly 7.5 gigs of space to store data. Use IMAP to push all of your emails to the server and then use that Gmail account for archive email only.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes! The thing that appeals to me the most about using Gmail is that searching through 5+GB of old emails won't make everything in my machine slow to a crawl. Even with the free Gmail account, you can up the storage to 20GB for $5/year, and that extra space is available from other Google services connected to the same account.
If you want to have more flexibility, sign up for a Backupify account, which can backup Gmail pretty well. As a bonus, when Backupify stores your backups they are kept in plain text fo
Re: (Score:2)
just download it all every now and again via the POP3 interface and burn it/keep it locally
The only problem with that is you lose all of your tags/labels. All you manage to download is a TON of unsorted email.
An Advertiser's Fantasy ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that from Google's perspective gmail is a tool to better profile you for targeted advertising. Make sure you are OK with that before giving them access to all your emails.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, so I hear this a lot and I never really understand the problem.
The "unwritten gmail contract" (and it actually applies to most Google products) is this: We will give you a service for free (in this case Gmail), and in return we are going to profile your use of that service to select ads for you. In the case of gmail, they give you however many GB of storage, always-on cloud email, and the best searchable email system I've ever seen. There are other Google examples, from gtalk to Google Docs. The bas
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Until they start selling that information about you to third parties. Google having a profile about me that's used in house to target ads to me, is OKish acceptable. Them selling this info to third parties is a definite no-go. And there is nothing that I am aware of preventing them doing just that, other than their own ethics.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, I'm really highly concerned that an advertiser might learn that I like electronics and am a huge computer geek. Because there's no other way they could know that.
Seriously, this is what I did; I pushed everything to GMail, like the OP, tens of thousands of emails, going back to the 90s.
Email is not and has never been a secure media, so if you've been putting sensitive data in emails, you're not being really bright anyway.
OK, My Favorite (Score:3, Interesting)
MailSteward on the Mac.
SQL database. Good, Inexpensive, works w/many tens of thousands of emails & more.
http://mailsteward.com/ [mailsteward.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Forgot to note a key factor and that is ultimately format independence, since email clients come and go over time & then many key output formats, so you are not restricted on that avenue.
The search function is certainly a key for me, as sometimes I know only one key word in attempting to find a note about material, object or company from 15 years back.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Mail.app says I have 377,002 _unread_ messages in my Computers folder (including all the subfolders).
Not sure how many total messages, or the total size. I asked Mail.app, and it's busy thinking about it.
Spotlight seems to do pretty well, but sometimes I can be looking at a message, see a word, and ask spotlight and it says, "huh?".
Mbox or SQLite (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want an "email format" why not mbox? Many things currently support that as an import option.
If you want a database, why not SQLite? It's about as open as can be, backwards compatibility is almost a religion and should have no problem with hundreds of thousands of entries.
mbox + grep (Score:5, Funny)
I use mbox format [wikipedia.org] files and grep [gnu.org].
IMO, one can't get much more portable than that.
Maildir (Score:5, Informative)
Maildir [wikipedia.org].
And if you have an e-mail client that don't support it, use an IMAP server to feed your client. /thread
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maildir [wikipedia.org].
And if you have an e-mail client that don't support it, use an IMAP server to feed your client. /thread
With the proviso that you probably want to break up your archives in something akin to the following format:
. 2009
. . Q1
. . . Sent
. . . Received
. . Q2
. . . Sent
. . . Received
[...]
. 2010
. . Q2
. . . Sent
. . . Received
Lots and lots of messages in a directory can cause problems with many file systems. If you have more than say ~8K or so messages in a folder, I'd recommend breaking it up. At work this is what I do at work (CY/Qx/Sent-Received), which also allows me to move entire quarters into PST files when I
Good IMAP Server (Score:5, Informative)
Maildir (Score:5, Interesting)
Maildir storage format is resistant to bit-rot because it stores each message in a separate file, and uses filesystem directories for mail folders. It's widely supported by user agents (mail readers) and IMAP/POP3/SMTP servers, so you'll never be stranded by the actions of a single software vendor. Finally, it's easily searched using everyday unix tools - find, grep, sed, awk, etc., and you can use the full-text search engine of your choice for speedy searches.
Re:Maildir (Score:4, Informative)
mairix is a useful addition to a maildir setup: http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ [force9.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
mairix is good, but it has some warts and it is not under development anymore. Among other things, it can run out of memory, has problems with parsing certain multipart messages, and can't search for an IP address (or any other string with dot-separated tokens.)
It's about the best I've found, but I wish someone would pick up development and fix some of the issues. As time goes on, bit-rot is going to set in and mairix will get less and less useful.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only sane alternatives are, as far as I'm c
Re: (Score:2)
citadel (Score:4, Informative)
citadel at www.citadel.org is a full pop3/imap server with full-text indexing.
Thunderbird can use server-side searches to find messages, and I find that works pretty well.
Storage and search can be different problems (Score:2)
Have you looked at Archiveopteryx [archiveopteryx.org]? That is one potential solution to the storage side of the problem. It stores the messages into a PostgreSQL database with minimal tinkering, so you can always get the original plain text stuff back out again. Consider it a database of mbox files that exposes an IMAP interface. You can't get any less proprietary than Postgres, and you can scale up many of its operations using standard database approaches in that area.
What I would do here is store messages there as my pe
my solution (Score:2)
Donate your archive to science ... (Score:2)
Fairly reliable way to get mail out of old clients (Score:2)
First, setup a new account on your imap server just for archival purposes (you can setup an imap server on any UNIX/Linux distro and even Windows with Cygwin fairly easily - dovecot is a good place to start). Make sure its using either mbox or maildir (preferred).
Second, setup said account on all the mail clients you'd like to archive.
Stuff it in a server (Score:2)
You should put all that stuff on an IMAP server on your home network (preferably a box you can reach from the outside using DDNS or a static entry if you have your own domain).
In that way your client OS'es can be whatever platform you choose, and they will all be able to access your mail storage.
Put older mails in separate folders.
If you can work with Linux there are plenty of choices. If not, consider Windows Home Server and get a mailserver product for Windows - there are plenty!
Many advanced email client
Python! (Score:2)
While this answer will almost certainly not suit the OP, it may be of interest to other folk looking to archive their email. Using python and a combination of imaplib [python.org] and some basic file I/O you can save the original text of messages. My rationale for this was firstly that it's probably less problematic than converting between various email client formats; and secondly that it's a decent way to learn some python! ;)
My rather basic implementation just dumps every email from an (IMAP) folder sequentially. I r
Look at it a different way (Score:2)
Scary thought, but you might just want to pick up one of the tools that the lawyers use for electronic discovery. They cover multiple mail formats (including older generations of said formats) and set it up so that it's easy for an intern to search for keywords and the like, so someone that understands tech should be able to use it I've had to use the Clearwell appliance and it did what it was supposed to do, including finding attachments and indexing them for ease of search. (No, I don't work for Clea
Store them in mbx format (Score:2, Insightful)
I recommend mbox (MBX) format.
1. The format is text based and not likely to become unreadable anytime in the forseeable future.
2. There are no shortage of tools for manipulating mbox.
3. Its easily indexed by full text search applications (MS Search included with windows)
The outlook tools save dialouge has an apple export option which is actually the mbox format.
In terms of archival access I recommend an IMAP server with a folder hirarchy based on month/year. Your mail client should be configured to leave t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I find that Maildir works better than mbox for my purposes. Roughly all of the same pros, plus:
4) Doesn't require locking your entire mailbox to modify one message.
5) Resistant to file/inode corruption (will likely only corrupt one message instead of several.)
6) Can essentially use shell tools to copy individual messages.
One thing that's neat to do with maildir mailboxes is to search using grep+xargs and copy the messages you find into a new maildir mailbox (named, perhaps, searchresults). Then you have a
We have something similar at Work (Score:3, Insightful)
At work, we needed to archive (for compliance purposes) all the inbound/outbound email messages of our users (about a 1K aprox). We setup an Ubuntu server with postfix and dovecot IMAP over SSL, using Maildir.
Our users generate about 20K email messages daily, and we store each day in it's own directory, something like this:
INBOX
|- YYYY
|- MM
|- DD
The auditors use Evolution to connect to the archive server and search the emails, even though it takes a little while to load a day of emails for the first time, once it's properly loaded searching is really fast. The server is not that powerful, it's a VM with 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM. You do need a lot of storage though.
Hope this helps.
Whats wrong with Eudora? (Score:2)
imap + sql for storage (Score:2)
The many comments here about using just imap with maildir or mbox storage backends forget to mention that these are all very slow to search when you have thousands of messages. They dont store the files in any kind of disk-seek friendly format. soo..
I suggest either putting a dovecot with maildir++ system on fast SSD to overcome the poorly organized(on disk) files
-and/or-
using a mysql/postgresql backend on dovecot or courier or your favorite imap that supports *sql. The mail would be stored with each deta
IMAP with maildir backend (Score:3, Insightful)
Try Aid4Mail (Score:2)
There's a commercial, but low cost, package that I've used to do exactly what you are describing: http://www.aid4mail.com/
Aid4Mail converts email to and from a variety of mail formats. The feature that you might find useful is that it will create a zip archive that contains standard .msg format email messages. Use that in combination with an indexing programme. I use X1 (http://x1.com/), but there are lots of indexing programmes that will index zip archives for easy searching.
XENA (Score:2)
http://xena.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
A great Java free software for mail (and other documents) automatic normalization and archivation, developed by Australian Government
Google Apps (Score:2)
Gmail offers all that you wish for. Take the free premium trial for GApps, bulk import, then cancel. Problem solved?
What I (would) do (Score:2)
As many above have mentioned part of this, I just wanted to put some of it together:
- setup a small server with a file system with checksums - ohh, that probably just leaves zfs
- setup dovecot on the server with maildirs
- setup clients to use imap to put messages on the server, if you have any existing imap-accounts, use mbsync directly on the server
- setup thunderbird as a client to index it all in thunderbirds own index-files, so you can search it directly from thunderbird
- use xapian or something similai
mbox (Score:2)
have mail going back to 1991 archived as mbox files. Some of it is pretty disorganized, but since 2000 I've organized mail into Sent-Archived and Received-Archived directories with the mbox files named YYYY-MM.
It's a pain to search. But on the other hand, I hardly ever need to search the really old stuff, so grep and friends are good enough.
I may eventually split it out into maildir format and use a full-text indexing engine such as Xapian to make searching easier. But I'll probably keep the master
Echo chamber... (Score:5, Informative)
...has me doing a "me too!" to everyone telling you to use IMAP + maildir; I use dovecot myself, complete with self-signed SSL cert (curse you firefox!).
El_Muerte_TDS [slashdot.org] has just pointed me towards mairix [debian.org], a dedicated maildir + friends indexing system which I've just tried out, and seems to be ideal for my use - fast email search has always been a good thing for me, but I've rarely found a nice lightweight indexing solution that was catered only to mail; "desktop" search engines tend to take the opinion that if I want one thing indexed then I automatically want everything indexed, and also insist on running around the clock. Much nicer for my needs to just have one little lightweight indexing program that only runs when I want it to.
Best thing about mairix IMHO is the way it creates a virtual maildir on the fly using symlinks, so not only is it easily viewable on the command line, it's also automatically compatible with all of those IMAP + maildir clients out there... which, last time I looked, was all of them. Useful hack for KMail users here [netmanagers.com.ar].
Disclaimer: my IMAP server has all its databases on an SSD, so even full text searches from the client are pretty speedy (seriously - the lack of access times on small chunks of random data cuts down search times by at least an order of magnitude), but obviously mairix has the advantage of being able to scale to multiple users with >X GB mailboxes much easier than spending a fortune on fast storage.
Add A Key Word (Score:2)
Although it would involve keeping an index you could add a strange key word to each piece of email within the body of the email. For example all emails from Donna in 2009 could be tagged with donna09. Running a search should yield all emails from Donna in 2009. You could also add the month. jaunuary09donna for example. You can even ask people to install a tag in every email they send to you.
Domino (Score:5, Funny)
It has good full text indexing, you can keep your mail on a client, and on the server, with incredibly flexible replication rules for what is stored where.
It supports IMAP, so it talks well to most clients.
The iPhone syncs seamlessly with it via ActiveSync, and an Android client is in beta as we speak.
It includes an http client, and the http client even offers offline access. That's right. You can use the http client, and still read your mail and write emails that will be sent the next time you make a connection.
It also has folders, but you can put any email into as many folders as you want, so you have the best of both Outlook folders and Gmail tags.
It supports auto-processing rules for automatic filing of data, as well as being a full development environment if you want to get really fancy.
It is brain dead easy to set up and maintain.
The server runs on Linux and Window, and the client runs on Linux, Windows and Mac.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I call you out troll. I also call you out on your made up problem of not knowing if something is read or not. Unread marks replicate between servers.
Re: (Score:3)
just because I can. (Score:4, Insightful)
just because I can.
That's a big assumption. You are asking slashdot, so I'm thinking you can't. Especially because imap never occurred to you.
Re:Psychiatric consultation! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I would use a computer older than your dad just to use as an alarm clock, but I just can't help upgrading.
Re:Psychiatric consultation! (Score:5, Interesting)
I never thought of turning an ancient host into an alarm clock.
Once however, I did hollow out an SGI case and turn it into a refrigerator.
The case was just too damned pretty to throw away.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Psychiatric consultation! (Score:5, Insightful)
You, sir, are a mental case! I suspect you have OCD with some component of Aspbergers that is making you have this fixation on doing all this work to save ancient bits of information.
How was this modded Informative? Saving correspondence for future reference is critically important. I have many times needed to refer back to messages that are years old, in order to pull up a vital bit of information that was suddenly relevant. I have needed to pull up an attachment from an email a few months old old, or view the exact wording of correspondence, check the date of a quotation, etc., more times than I can count, so searching and retrieval are both vitally important. 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.
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, as I want to have the email text and attachments in my possession.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How was this modded Informative? Saving correspondence for future reference is critically important. I have many times needed to refer back to messages that are years old, in order to pull up a vital bit of information that was suddenly relevant. I have needed to pull up an attachment from an email a few months old old, or view the exact wording of correspondence, check the date of a quotation, etc., more times than I can count, so searching and retrieval are both vitally important.
While the value you place on being able to retrieve critical pieces of information may be valid, your choice of storage medium is not. An email system is not a file server or database. Most index poorly, if at all, making searches horribly inefficient. And as has already been observed, it may be quite likely that those same things you value will be more than offset by their value to a hostile litigant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
So on the one hand, you think my saving email for later access and analysis is not useful, but then, you want to know why it is useful?
I run a research laboratory where we do two things, one is work on restoring sight to the blind, the other is to organize a conference every two years. The primary demographic analysis I need to do is to analyze the country-of-origin for email traffic pertinent to the conference. This has helped to raise many tens of thousands of dollars of support for the conference by de
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Starting with GMail I have kept every e-mail since 6/22/2004. I also brought over many e-mails I had in my saved folders from long before that. Am I insane? No. I have found this archive incredibly useful for any variety of uses even 6 years later.
Nothing like having your wife ask, "man, I wish we still had the recipe for deviled eggs we made in college. Too bad it was back in 2001." "No problem honey, hold."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
June 2001 - "Dave, can't go out tonight. I got a date with that fat chick.YEAH!"
Sept 2001 - "Dave, She's told me she pregnant."
Jan 2002 - "Dave, will you be the best man at the wedding
Shhhh - Dave's the real father (AC doesn't know)..
Re: (Score:2)
Migrate all to gmail With gmail you got room for your couple of GB. And the search feature works like a charm. Only thing missing is "folders" to make it act like you are used to.
Although the searching features in GMail are great, I find the interface with a single unified sequence of mail, and lack of folders (the tagging feature is far too clunky) to be a major impediment. The biggest issue though, is that I do not own a copy of the information on my own server.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also easy to search and sort. And I don't mean with a mail client's search features but truly powerful tools like find, grep and xargs.
+1 for IMAP/Maildir.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of people have been suggesting gmail, and that's great for some. There are some significant limitations/constraints, though.
1) I use the common "business identifier@vanitydomain.com" trick to help identify who is selling my e-mail address. Gmail has plus-addressing, which works reasonably well, however it is imperfect. Some spammers know about plus-addressing, and strip the plus.
Google Apps for Domains would work, except that you're pretty limited in the number of addres
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)