It seems like no one talks much about what to do with old mail. I asked a few uber tech friends and the answers weren’t convincing. If anything, it made me reconsider whether saving mail really made sense. When was the last time you looked for something more than a few months old?
But it pissed me off that there wasn’t a simple solution and I wasn’t about to part with a few years’ worth of typing. Damn it, those were my *tendons* I’d spent on all that typing. So I spent some frustrating hours trying to figure the best way to keep my old mail around with the twist that my mail is sitting in an IMAP server far away. Or rather, in the mail directories on my hosting account accessed through that IMAP server. Turns out, there’s no obvious or consensus way I could find to deal with it, and since I was just about using up my quota for the account I had to.
For the past few years I’ve used IMAP (I had used Exchange in the late 90′s and run my own server…ouch that hurt) and wanted a way to archive old messages to local disk files, in a format that I could still make use of.
Ideally, I would get Google Desktop to index it as well, but that could wait. The challenge of course is that since it’s IMAP, mail clients like Thunderbird and Outlook don’t necessarily have all messages in all folders locally; you might only have headers, or not even those. Worse, if you have it in your inbox to read it, then file it to another folder, it’s not there until you download it again while viewing *that* folder.
With about 10,000 messages across 20 folders on the server, I wasn’t going to do anything manually. And using Outlook’s PST files for local storage has long ago proven to be a dead end for reuse. In case you’re curious, forget it. There are a few incomplete, unstable, or abandoned approaches to accessing PSTs directly — which means the only reliable method is to go through Outlook itself.
A few years ago I wrote a utility in VB that crawled all the message stores using the Outlook object model, and wrote everything it found out as XML. So I have a few hundred megs of XML gunk that I’ve never used. So I know about that path, and it’s not useful enough. I figure I need those messages as files on disk that I can mirror onto other cheaper larger hard disks every few years until the future comes (at which point I’ll pay someone a few bucks to store it safely under mountain, or several mountains, encrypted and quickly accessible).
What I settled on was pretty simple in the end — I found a great piece of freeware called IMAPSize that not only lets you find out just how much your various IMAP folders weigh in bytes, but also lets you incrementally maintain local backups. Wahoo! Exactly what the doctor ordered, and it works beautifully. Apparently, you can use it to strip out attachments and leave messages in place, as well, though I haven’t used that. I saved everything locally as mbox files, and confirmed that attachments are stored in place with the messages, as you’d expect. Of course, getting them out from there is another matter…
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