Managing Your Mail Archives
July 21st, 2008
Most heavy Web users who do a significant amount of business through email need to contend with email on two fronts. There’s the issue of managing the flood of email that comes your way, replete with spam, newsletter subscriptions, stupid jokes being forwarded and so on. Then there’s the issue of managing the email you want to keep in case you need to go back into your archives and find something later on.
This is a post about the latter issue.
I have two laptops on which I do a lot of email. One of them has Outlook, for which there’s a terrific plugin called EZDetach that lets you easily archive attached files into any directory you want. I tend to archive everything, keeping Excel files in one folder, Word docs in another, PowerPoint presentations in another and so on. Then I archive my inbox and outbox quarterly into text files.
The goal, of course, is to minimize the size of your mailbox and to keep your .pst files small enough so that Outlook runs as quickly and smoothly as possible. I find EZDetach to be a tremendous help in making that happen.
My other laptop runs Vista (I know, I know; don’t ask) and has Windows Mail, for which EZDetach doesn’t have a version. In the search for an alternative I came across a great piece of software called ABC Amber Windows Mail Converter.
ABC Amber lets you save your email into all kinds of file formats, from .txt to .mp3 (if you have the Microsoft text-to-speech engine installed). I save mine as .html which means I get a snazzy Web page with all my email in it, including links to any attached files that are kept in an associated folder. All the .html files go into one folder for email archives and — voila! — email archiving problem solved.
There are tons of programs out there that will perform similar tasks as EZDetach and ABC Amber. You want to do something, though, because when your email program gets bloated it can affect your efficiency pretty quickly. It takes a few minutes to set yourself up with one of these programs, but if you choose an archiving system and stick to it you’ll save a lot of time in the long run.