How Do You Save Important Emails?
from the for-posterity's-sake dept
You know all those books full of letters written by famous people? Now that everything is email, will such things be possible in the future? The first reaction is that it only makes it more likely, since people are much more likely to write down their thoughts these days and send them to people, but some folks are concerned about how such correspondences will be saved. They're worried that there's no good way to save digital contents, and that anything you do will be obsolete a decade from now. Many people even recommend printing out and keeping a paper archive of important emails. Of course, these days, it seems that most systems have a pretty straight upgrade path from old formats to new. The only area where a real problem may arise is if someone didn't upgrade their email system for ages and all the standards changed and the digital media storage eroded. I think a bigger problem may be in picking out the valuable correspondences from all the spam and forwards and junk and unimportant emails.
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The only real problem is Microsoft
Almost every other mail client stores email as plain ascii text, building separate indexing as desired. Putting email into a proprietary format is, well, dumb.
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