
Ask HN: How do you handle your personal mail archive? - beagle3
I have &gt;25 years of personal mail in various mbox, MailDir, .pst and other formats, collected through the years; more recent stuff is also available on some gmail, fastmail and several other provider accounts.<p>Looking for email is an exercise in grepping all the mail stores, or looking at them through their respective software or service (Outlook, gmail, ...); It&#x27;s not something I have to do often, but when I do, it&#x27;s not easy; and I also don&#x27;t know how long it will be possible -- mail providers go away and change their terms of service; Outlook from 2007 might stop working and Outlook 2020 might refuse to read old mailboxen.<p>So, I am looking for a way to create a central, usable, searchable personal mail archive, that I can keep updating and that I know will still be usable in another 25 years.<p>What&#x27;s your recommended solution?<p>mailplier, enkive and other &quot;mail archive&quot; solution focus on legal archiving, but that is not my use case. I want it to be open source (at the very least, open protocol and open data format), and self hosted.<p>I&#x27;m on the path to just dump them all as maildir and index them with notmuch - but perhaps you have a better setup?
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brudgers
Curious about your use case for twenty-five year old emails (and indirectly
the anticipated use case for fifty year old emails).

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beagle3
I hoard data like the rest of us....

And more seriously, I have had recently had to refer to a contract from 2002,
which I didn’t properly file a paper copy of, but did have in email; and
things from 2007 and 2009 several times (the more recent, the more often).

I have had no use for emails older than 20 years (except nostalgic value) but
there is no logical cutoff.

For the same reason I keep a complete backup of my 5TB disk, rather than only
the 250GB I know for sure that I’ll need - deciding what to keep is actually
more expensive than keeping it all.

