Best way to archive 25 years of emails

Best way to archive 25 years of emails

4 pointsby astatine8 comments

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  • Give it to ai for import to SQL or json file, it useful and you can copy to server
  • Export in mbox format. Every mail client, now and in the future, will be able to read that.
  • You could pass it all to hister (searchable) and then just export to any format or keep the mbox format and simply lzma & encrypt the archive file.
  • I've synced 20 years of Gmail to a local Thunderbird via imap. The initial sync took a few days but it was pretty simple to set up.
  • Personally I prefer to have email history online in the form of a local IMAP server like Dovecot. It is saved in maildir format where each email is a separate file.

    I can then use an email client to move emails and folders between accounts.

    Make sure to have backups. I assume you currently don't have a backup, if it sits in gmail.

    by mpol
  • I literally just finished doing this with multiple years of Gmail. I used Thunderbird local folders for the archive, then Google Takeout to verify the message set before deleting anything. I also hashed the final MBOX copies before removing the originals. A little tedious, but it worked really well.
  • For converting emails into archival formats, the two open source tools I'd look into are ePadd and Mailbagit.

    If at least some subset of these emails are things you'd like to explore making searchable/viewable by the general public, I run fwdeveryone.com and am happy to chat.

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