Like many people, I now rely on web-based solutions for email (namely GMail) and I love it like this. However, I do want to be able to archive my email from time to time. So, lately, I just downloaded all my email from a veeery long time ago until now, got a huuuge mbox file, and converted it into multiple .eml files because I believe it’s a bit more easy to use/search/archive (but maybe that’s a mistake).
The main problem is attachments: I do want to keep the text of all these messages, but have usually no interest in keeping the attachments in most cases, and I’m trying to make this as small as possible if want to keep it around for a long time. I searched for easy solutions to “trim” attachments out of .eml messages, but didn’t find a nice way to do it automatically so I just ended up opening the biggest ones with a text editor and removing the encoded attachment by hand…
So I was just wondering how you guys handled email archiving. Do you archive email at all? Do you have simple ways of removing attachments? Or do you just dump the whole thing onto a blank CD or DVD every once in a while and don’t care about size?
I use attachment extractor extension for thunderbird. It can extract the attachment from a email and save it than delete the attachment from the message or just delete the attachment only.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/556
Now I use GMail IMAP with evolution 2.20. There is a brand new function to archive mails and parameters in a tar.gz
I have no idea for your attachment problem.
To be perfectly honest, I just copy my mail folder to an external hard drive every now and then. Since I don’t have work based mail (separate account, backed up by the company), I find this more than sufficient.
I run an IMAP server and use offlineimap to archive it from a number of locations. I also use rsnapshot in conjunction with one of my fetches, which protects me against loss due to human error rather than disk failure. That might sound a bit extreme, but you can run an IMAP server on your own desktop and use offlineimap to “clone” it to other places, you don’t necessarily need your own mailserver.
I’m straight-up gmail. I thought I’d get around to setting up at least POP (and now IMAP) but honestly I’ve not had any reason to. I did notice Evolution sports a handy dandy strip-attachments option these days.
Keep your attachments, storage is cheap.
Look into a project called MimeDefang. This very cool tool could do things like what you want. In particular, I think it would remove the attachments to messages and replace them with a URL to the file. Sounds exactly like what you want to do.
/djs
I used to archive my local inbox in pre-gmail ages.
After reading horror stories about deleted gmail accounts, I created a second gmail account.
On my main account i configured pop, and on my archive gmail i set it up to download mail from a pop server and make it point to my main account
So now I have my main gmail, and a second gmail which is up to date with my main one in case of nightmares
I’m still to download that to my hard drive or do the same thing with a different provider
I’ve used Gmail for some time now, what I do is once every 6 months or so I download it all via POP into thunderbird. I then tar my thunderbird profile folder and delete it.
When thunderbird starts up again, it automatically creates a new profile.
I don’t think it’s the best system but it’s the easiest I’ve come up with.
In our Exchange enterprise environment for email archiving we use archive manager</a that is a part of scriptlogic’s exchange management soluton.
This tool captures all messages to a centralized and compressed database storing only a single copy of all messages and attachments. This can not only save a lot of diskspace but it’s also a good way for keeping email secutity compliance.
There is an easer method to record and archive Gmail. You can use a hardware solution to automatically do this task for you. Like the freedom9 Internet content recorder . Simply open and log into your Gmail account, and the icr does the rest. It will log all emails in your inbox, plus it will record any incoming and out going emails to your Gmail account. You can still backup your email to a single file if that is easer for you.