Hi

I have a massive mailbox accumulated over years at work. Now I've always sorted my mails into seperate folders. First off by project name, and then lates by year/project name for clarification.

What I would like to do now is to archive old mail relating to projects that are no longer active.

What is the best method of archiving mail? Store it in some sort of database? Plain text files? Print them all out?

Does anyone have experience with this? What method do you use, or do you still just keep them as folders in your mailbox?

- wil

I tend to do the same as you. Just archive them into appropriate sub-folders, and then I know where they are when I want to find them again :)

Printing them out is a good idea, but I'm not sure how you would organise them (or find an email if ever needed again).

Another option is to burn them onto CD (with XP, you can simply drag-drop the emails onto a CD, and tell it to burn them all on :) Importing back in again is just as simple (drag-drop). This is with Outlook XP.

Hope tat helps :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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FWIW:

Currently (with Outlook) we auto-archive anything older than 120 days - In the past I've done plain text since that format is the most convenient/accessible.

We do everything by project or job number so everythng from phone calls to photocopies to computer files are together. About six months to a year after a job is completed all files get burned to CDs (db, accounting, emails, scans of all paper items such as phone bills, faxes etc) and then everything gets nuked from the servers. We put everything into text format (plain, delimited, etc, except for PDFs) because you never know when you're going to need that old SuperCalc file to convert into Excel.

I guess the key question is what email program are you using?

If you're using Outlook, there are some cool Outlook Add-ins that will output your mails into an Access or SQL Server database, that you can then query in the future if you want to retrieve messages/data. Kind of cool, sets up a "real" relational structure for your email system.
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Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me

I'm using a number of mail programs to access my mailbox. Essentially the mailbox is in Maildir format.

- wil