Need a good archiving strategy

1

I just purchased eM Client 3.0 with Sync2eM. I’m fairly satisfied so far, but I need a good monthly archiving strategy. I could use some suggestions.

In a given month, I handle about between 500 and 700 emails (total of all send and receive from all accounts). For example, last month the total was 687. These are stored in several IMAP folders during the month.

At the end of each month, I need to save off all these emails in some sort of archive. The emails don’t need to be immediately accessible. They just need to be in a format that can be backed up to external media and saved for an indefinite period, and retrieved later if needed. Once they are backed up, the originals are deleted.

When I was on Outlook Express, this was easy to archive. At the end of each month, I would move all the emails from their IMAP locations into a local folder (MonthlyArchive) and then just backup OE’s MonthlyArchive.dbx file to an external drive. Then I could delete the emails from OE.

If I needed a past email, it was easy to copy the relevant month’s MonthlyArchive.dbx from the external drive back to OE’s folder and have access to that month’s emails.

In eM Client, I can’t seem to find a good equivalent process. I’ve looked at the file structure in the storage area. I see three "mail_ " folders, which I’m guessing have ALL the mail from all accounts in it. So backing those up would be easy. But then if I needed to get access to a past email, I’m guessing overwriting those files from backup would trash all the existing email.

The only option I see is to save all the emails as .EML files, then back up those files. Unfortunately, the save process takes quite a while for 600+ emails. But the worse part is there will be emails (say between 15 to 30) that will have the same date, time, and subject. So I keep getting a pop-up with “already exists”, and I have to sit there and click “Keep Both” to keep the process moving. (It might be easier if there were a checkbox option for “don’t ask me again” on this box to take whatever I choose as the default for the rest of the copying.)

Besides this, is there any better strategy for archiving?

Thanks,
Al

2

Almost a week … and no response???

3

Hi Al,

just to get a better idea. Did you try to export to the .EML files directly from the IMAP account or did you copy the messages into local folder first?

Thanks,
Filip

4

Thanks for the reply.

I exported directly from the IMAP account.

But I do have these options checked on the accounts:

  • Download message for offline use
  • Include attachments and images

So if I export to .EML from the IMAP account, does that mean eM Client hits the IMAP server to get a copy to save it, rather than the downloaded copy it already has? Would moving them to a local folder speed up the process?

And the bigger question is - If I do that, Is there any way to export the folder, rather than individual messages?

Thanks,
Al