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Ask HN: Do you save/archive your emails?

12 points by runxel ↗ HN
I was wondering what the best way to save Emails is, really.

I am using Thunderbird, configured to IMAP, and normally can find anything I want. But how to make this info to persist? Especially when in a working environment, where often enough Emails are kind of legal documents, which need to be preserved, if there any debates in the future, or just to reconstruct things later.

I've seen many people saving their Emails as `.eml` along the other project files, which I think is a dumb idea, because you will lose all that meta data (treeview!).

Others are using the 'archive' function of there email programs – also not a good idea.

What's your solution?

11 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 33.4 ms ] thread
zelphirkalt
At work I simply use the shortcuts "M" to mark as read and "A" to archive and almost everything is archived, except for useless information. I also have lots of filters configured, which put emails into appropriate local subfolders, so that I can access them already knowing their category and mentally parse them faster.

In private, I have a much more elaborate setup, making use of saved searches and sub saved searches, tags, multiple e-mail accounts. Private e-mails have much more variety than work e-mails and I also do not see the need to keep them all. However, I still keep many, for example for all kinds of programming languages in my kind of "read later" subfolders. If I was to look at all of them, however, I would probably have years of work ahead of me. It is probably just a way to categorize and declutter the inbox. Every few weeks I need to be really determined to get my inbox to below 10 e-mails, otherwise uncategorized e-mails will fill it up quickly. Sometimes I need to revise my folder structure or, rarer, need to add another saved search.

I always find my e-mails either by looking in the correct folder, saved search or by using the global search or view local search.

I find Thunderbird indispensable for my workflow and highly configurable. The only thing lacking is a compound condition system for saved searches or filters instead of only having disjunctive or conjunctive single attribute conditions.

itronitron
if you want to properly archive your emails then you should print them on paper
steve_adams_86
Is this true though? I feel like encrypted and redundantly stored in some cold web storage would be inexpensive and reliable, whereas with paper... Well, I lose those all the time, but I have files in cold storage that I guess by now are 15 years old or so.

Another tough part of using paper is that you'd need to do it frequently. I get so many emails, and I'd like to keep a good portion of them. I'd be printing every week. It would be pretty expensive and inconvenient.

itronitron
I suppose my comment was a bit cavalier, this wouldn't be a good choice for most of your emails, just the very important ones of which I assume there are no more than several each month (or year).

Printing as a photograph would be more durable and could easily be pasted into a photo album. If the photo included a child (of the person taking the photograph) standing next to the email then that would further ensure that it doesn't get tossed in the trash, and also provide a rough timestamp for future generations.

I don't consider cloud storage to be permanent, secure, or reliable. I used to have 'important' files on zip-drives and floppies if anyone remembers what those are. Many computers no longer have CD or DVD drives. SD cards and thumb drives seem like a lasting technology, for now at least. I still have important documents printed from twenty-five years ago.

mceachen
SD cards typically lose their data integrity within a decade, and sometimes as soon as 5-7 years.

Some SD cards support "extended storage" for up to 20 years, but it's an uncommon feature.

klingonopera
On Thunderbird, I create local copies (select all messages, right-click, copy-to local folder), right-click on that to properties, find its location on disk, and compress and archive.

Not sure about whole portability aspect of this, recently upgraded my desktop and copied straight from one Thunderbird local directory to the other, that worked. But I wonder if Thunderbird upgrades, if there'd ever be a problem with this method.

javagram
If you are in a “working environment” and you are working for a large corporation, your IT department should be doing this for you using the archiving / retention systems built into G Suite / Office 365 / whatever mail server you’re using.

If you aren’t using an IT-managed system, look into the best way to create backups of your email service and store those backups with your regular backups. Google offers “Google Takeout” or there are SaaS services that will do this for you, e.g. Backupify. Other email services have similar features.

zzo38computer
I just save them in a mbox file, using the "s" command, which automatically moves it to the mbox file in the home directory. I can then use "mail -f" to recall them.
jesterson
I'm keeping zero Inbox while sending important emails to DevonThink.
Someone
”where often enough Emails are kind of legal documents, which need to be preserved”

Nowadays, e-mails also often are legal documents that need to be destroyed in due time. For example, you can’t legally keep an application letter around forever, irrespective of whether it got delivered by snail mail or e-mail.

At work, I throw away a year of e-mails at the start of each year, keeping one year, growing to two years during the year.

jolmg
I use isync/mbsync[1], probably available via your package manager. It's a utility that can sync between IMAP and Maildirs. So, I just sync each account to subdirectories in ~/mail/ and my email client views my emails from there instead of connecting itself to the IMAP server.

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net