For leagally compliant long-term storage of mails (including conversion of convertable attachements) would be a great feature.
The PDF should contain the mailheader, a list of attachmements, the complete mail body and – if possible – the converted attachements behind.
Attachements like ZIP should be exttraced and saved into a folder named identical to the name of the e-mail.
Naming should look like “yyyymmdd-subject”.pdf
If this feature would support batch mode (export all mails from start to end date, all selected, whole folder,… als PDF/A) this would be a very interesting unique selling proposition.
For storage of the email, simply use Save As or Export. That saves the email and it’s attachments as an eml file, which is readable by any email client. That way there is no need for converting or unzipping anything. The email remains exactly as it is, with everything included. That is good for forensics because nothing has changed from the original.
Save As uses the email subject as the file name, but Export uses “yyyy-mm-dd time subject.eml” as the naming convention, and also maintains folders within folder trees,
I think that the view accross existing borders and/or limitations is the major reason, why we have cars for fast traveling instead of walking for days.
EML is no long term and leagally compliant backup format.
And there are additional tools available, that can convert EML to PDF/A (as described). This is possibly a good point, to think about, because it shows, that there is a need for it.
I found some applications that will work for you, irrespective of your email client:
MailArchiva. Though it does not store the emails as pdf, I think you will find that this can export to pdf pretty much how you want. https://www.mailarchiva.com
Maybe you are correct - I guess if the idea gets support it may be considered.
My final comment on this topic is that you are always welcome to come and stay in the UK, where the current options in eM Client are sufficient to satisfy any legal requirements.
Thank you for your invitation, it is a long time ago since my last UK visit. Nice idea, but this does not help regarding to the demands in Germany. Form technical point of view they are somehow bizzare, but it is what it is.
Fromt technical view this alternative export (beside EML) should not that hard as it seems. Because everything is available, it is just another format to save.
