[Techtalk] Archiving Email.. need ideas, tips, etc..

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

Hi there,

The first task I see, is converting all back into one format, easy to
parse and well known (with extraction tools available). My choice would
be mbox.
>From there you'll be able to fetch one mail at a time, convert what you
want into what you need. Maybe one sub-directory par mail, one text file
containing headers (always useful for indexing), one pdf file result of
the conversion of the e-mail's body, attached files, stored
individually.

If disk space would allow it, I'd rather build an Imap server and import
everything into it, letting it do the indexing job, any imap capable
e-mail client being able to run a search afterwards.

just some idea ...

R. Daneel Olivaw,
The Human Robot Inside.



Le jeudi 09 octobre 2008 à 17:59 +0100, Figaro a écrit :
> Hello, all.
> I need some ideas to accomplish a task dumped in my "inbox" and now
> flowing out the drawers, as it were!
> 
> I have sitting on my desk a box containing 35+ 18gib u-320 hard drives,
> each full of e-mail messages.
> My given task is to find a way to archive all this "history" in .pdf
> files. I am told, though have not yet verified, there are 2 email
> formats that were used and herein stored, as two mailer programs were used:
> Mozilla (more likely they used Netscape of some flavor) and Evolution
> .mbox .... though several employees are emphatic there were periods that
> Opera was the pie of the moment all were instructed to use.......!
> So, what I am needing to do is salvage the individual e-mails with
> content intact as a separate .pdf per user (or series of .pdfs for the
> more "Fluent and higher stature" users) then generate a catalog as
> another .pdf. Finally one is to make dvd.iso files for the obvious
> utility of archive use.
> 
> Anyway, does anyone have an idea how one may approach this?
> Fortunately there is NO MS Win. stuff involved, Linux, HP-UX and Solaris.
> I'll do the work in and on Linux (Debian SID), likely Inkscape, oo.org,
>  Gimp, maybe Scribus if needed. Or pstopdf.
> 
> Thank you,
> matthew
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