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?
