Best way to archive emails for later searching

An anonymous reader writes: 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).

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 OS's 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?

Simple solution

[ccrasher]

Try converting all the Email to a PDF package. I have been adding to a pdf package for several years directly from outlook and also include any or all important attachments. You can sort or search at anytime using names, times, subjects, attachments or just about any other query parameter that you can think of. You can also secure the package and if higher security is desirable you can also save the secured package in an office one note notebook with a password which makes the file a little harder to crack.