[or-roots] Archiving email

[Leslie Chapman]

Apologies that this is a copy of my post to the Wheeler list, but if anyone
is interested I have also saved Oregon list postings to a certain extent and
much more consitently for the last six months or so.

I learned a real neat trick as a result of being 500+ behind in archiving my
email. Yes I save most of it. I was forced to find a way to save as much as
I could as my system seemed to be on the verge of total meltdown, utimately
it turned out to be a bad system init file and has more or less recovered
but here is what I learned.

This may only apply to Microsoft outlook user, I don't know, those who use
other email programs are on their own.

In outlook you can select as many emails as you want in the summary window,
or whatever the heck it is called: the one that lists your email by from,
subject date and so on. You then go to "File menu" and click on "save as" ,
type in the name you want it saved under and outlook will create a text file
that will include the complete text of every email you have selected.

So what you might say? Well, I save almost everything which froom time to
time certain people point out is ridiculous, but if you want to save a lot
of stuff, this is easier than the way I was doing it. For example I just
saved all the Wheeler list stuff that came in last night to my file;
"Wheeler list gleanings". No I haven't saved everything posted for the last
year, but I have most of it. I used to go and copy the text of the oldest
message, paste it to the file, go back determine who sent it, copy their
email address, paste it next to the text, go back and copy the subject if I
thought it was useful, paste it. and quite often I would date the
discussion. Now I have created a Wheeler Folder, I drop all the email I want
to save in there, sort it by reverse date with oldest at the top, create a
text file, copy the text file to "Wheeler list gleanings" and igf I want, I
am done. I usually spend time cleaning up the posts, but now I don't feel so
much pressure to do that, as I will have the thread much better laid out.
This way I get the whole thing in one cut and paste, name and email add for
who posted, date and time posted, subject and the entire text.

A couple of qualifiers, it seems outlook express only allows you to do one
letter at a time, which I find annoying as it severely reduces the advantage
of the method, and you do not get attachment information, all you get is the
name of the attachment.

I hope some of you find this worthwhile information.

Les C