[9x/Me] Email Archiving

[triger49]

Hi...

Hoping maybe somebody can offer a solution?

Dealing with a relatively large amont of emails

and using Foxmail v5.8 . Trying to come up with

an archival solution. The problem is, any export /

Save as.. results in a file with the export date....not

the creation date or date received. So far, I have only

found one shareware solution that came close to what

I was looking for.....

Thanks

Jake

Edited December 29, 2009 by dencorso
Title changed to highlight the fact that the sought solution must work in 9x/ME.

[DigeratiPrime]

You want to archive each email into a seperate file?

Also curious why use Foxmail when there is Thunderbird?

[triger49]

You want to archive each email into a seperate file?

hi...thanks for taking the time to answer ...actually, what I was hoping for was a way

to import them into a searchable database of some sort. The numbers run into the

the thousands. It also would be great to sort according to message content instead of

just dates.

Also curious why use Foxmail when there is Thunderbird?

I do use Thunderbird on my laptops for the ability to use "imap" . But for lite

and fast under Windows 9x ...Foxmail is hard to beat. The preview before

download, the forced text mode where one has to physically click a button

to view in html format. The only time it has ever crashed is when my ISP's

server was having trouble.

But I'm not here to sell anybody on Foxmail ....and the new 6x version was pretty

messy the last time I tryed it anyway.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated....

Jake

[dencorso]

Since this thread attracted few replies while being in the Software Hangout, I'm moving it back just to see whether it fares better here in the 9x/ME forum.

[triger49]

Since this thread attracted few replies while being in the Software Hangout, I'm moving it back just to see whether it fares better here in the 9x/ME forum.

Hey, thanks kind sir ..

You must have read my mind, after a hectic week, I finally got back

to this. One thing I did think of, Keynote by Marek Jedinski (spelling?)

had an Email import utility where you could do batch imports. i still

use keynote, but darned if I can find where I might have archived

that utility. Nor do I remember why I abandoned the idea before.

Never the less, I sure am open to suggestions. Half the fun of computer

archive /database is being able to find what your looking for.

Jake

[triger49]

Hi;

While I was digging around looking for a solution,

stumbled upon this little gem. Thought I would pass

it along. So close to the traditional office desk

with 3 letter trays and a filing cabinet, it's uncanny.

Calendar and to-do list with ability to attach an email

to an item in your to-do list. Light, fast and works

well with my 98se. Breezemail;

http://www.b2ltd.com/databaseplace/breezemail.htm

I only tried the portable version so far.

Jake

Edited March 5, 2010 by triger49

[Multibooter]

what I was hoping for was a way to import them into a searchable database of some sort.

Hi Jake,

Emailchemy http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/index.html might help you.

1) I had used Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 under Win98SE to convert emails from old Netscape Communicator v4.8 to old Eudora v3.05 (of 1997). Older Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 works fine on my 10-year-old Inspiron laptop with 512MB RAM; for the latest version the author's website recommends a minimum of 1GB of RAM.

2) Just recently I have used Emailchemy to disinfect old virus-infected Eudora email .mbx files; Kaspersky Anti-Virus is not able to disinfect individual emails in a .mbx container, you can only delete the whole mailbox containing thousands of emails.

Emailchemy can convert an .mbx mailbox file into "RFC-822 message folders" (actually .txt files), one .txt file for each email message. To clean up an infected mail box, I:

- converted the .mbx file with Emailchemy to about 4000 individual RFC-822 message .txt files

- checked with Kaspersky the extracted 4000 .txt files (some viruses/trojans already got deleted during the conversion)

- opened the infected .txt message files with TextPad (Notepad doesn't work; WordPad doesn't work either, it reacts to embedded MS stuff) and either manually deleted trailing junk in the .txt file (i.e. the trojan), or I just deleted the infected .txt file

- after all infected stuff was removed, I converted with Emailchemy the 4000 message files (.txt) back into a Eudora .mbx file.

The basic approach is:

email container (e.g. Eudora .mbx) ==> convert to many individual .txt message files ==> fiddle around with the individual .txt message file ==> convert back to email container

BTW, the email container re-created from individual .txt message files is about 20-30% bigger than the original email container, but it works.

Infected messages are a major problem when archiving emails, virus scanners are just not up-to-date. For example, a couple of years ago, Kaspersky didn't find anything bad in an old .mbx mail box. Now, with the current virus signature update, Kaspersky detects some infected messages, which it didn't find earlier. For easy future disinfection of email messages containing currently not yet detected trojans/viruses it may be preferrable to archive emails as individual RFC-822 .txt message files and put them into a .rar file. I don't want to archive infected stuff.

3) Emailchemy has also helped me repair corrupt Eudora mailbox files (old Eudora v3.05 would just become "not responding" with them), by letting me extract the messages of a mailbox as .txt files. I could then edit with TextPad the individual .txt files. All my corrupt .mbx Eudora mailbox files were caused when old Eudora v3.05 somehow created inside of the .mbx file a corrupt email message containing many email messages, instead of a single message.

The mailbox corruption was cleaned up after I:

- extracted with Emailchemy the bad message file as a .txt file

- manually split it up in TextPad into many files with only a single email message

- saved the split up .txt files under any name (e.g. msg001.txt etc)

- converted the split up files plus all the other good RFC-822 message files back into a single .mbx file.

4) You could create a searchable database of your emails by converting your emails with Emailchemy into thousands of little RFC-822 .txt files, and then simply use Win98 Find.

You are using Foxmail v5.8, which is not on the list of email file formats which Emailchemy can read; you may have to export your email files in a format which Emailchemy can read.

The problem is, any export / Save as.. results in a file with the export date.... not the creation date or date received

Emailchemy assigns the date (YearMonthDay-Time) as the initial part of the file name of each RFC-822 .txt file, e.g. "20030629-1355 eBay Item Purchase Titan Notebook Cooler Item 1234567890.txt". Message .txt files, which don't contain the date (e.g. .txt files manually repaired/extracted from a corrupt Eudora .mbx mailbox file where the date was somehow missing) are assigned the current date by Emailchemy.

5) One of my long, ongoing projects is to archive old stuff, like old floppies, old CDs/DVDs, old photos, old LPs. So archiving old emails could become also part of this archiving effort, although there is no time-pressure to archive old emails. Unlike old floppies, old CDs, old photos or old LPs, old emails don't decay.

Edited March 9, 2010 by Multibooter

[Multibooter]

Since this thread attracted few replies while being in the Software Hangout, I'm moving it back just to see whether it fares better here in the 9x/ME forum.

Re: topic title "[9x/Me] Email Archiving". Emailchemy is Java-based and works apparently under many operating systems, e.g. Linux, not just 9x/Me. But maybe this topic should stay under Win9x since Emailchemy might be a useful tool to access, under Linux, old emails created with old Win9x software. Edited March 9, 2010 by Multibooter

[Multibooter]

So far, I have only found one shareware solution that came close to what I was looking for

Which one is that?

Here 2 notes about Emailchemy:

1) I view Emailchemy as a program comparable to Winzip or WinRAR, but Emailchemy handles containers of email messages, while Winzip or WinRAR handle containers of files. The various .mbx email containers created by my old Eudora v3.05 are uncompressed, just a concatenation of many tiny messages.

One of my .mbx files, for example, is 7.1MB and contains 1190 concatenated email messages. The 1190 message files extracted as .txt take up 20.1 MB (FAT32, 16kB cluster size). The 1190 extracted .txt message files put into a .rar file with normal compression use 2.6 MB. That single 7.1 MB .mbx file, compressed into a .rar file, uses only 392kB.

If you plan to use WinXP to search your database of extracted message files, it might be preferrable to create a .zip file from the extracted .txt message files, not a .rar file, since WinXP Search, in contrast to Win98 Find, can search inside .zip files.

2) I have not yet checked whether Emailchemy handles PGP-encrypted messages correctly. Also, I have used Emailchemy only to extract individual .mbx files, not all 50+ .mbx mailbox files plus attachments in a single step; extracting a single mailbox causes a warning by Emailchemy about possible errors (maybe because of references to attachments which can't be found???), but the output of Emailchemy looked fine.

Edited March 10, 2010 by Multibooter

[triger49]

Hey Multibooter;

Wow, thanks man ...that is some detailed leg work you

have done there. Sorry I was so slow responding here. Kinda got

sidetracked on a repair job. but that is a subject for another topic!

I'll just skim the highlites here till I have more time this evening

to respond. Some really great idea's surfaced as i was reading your

post. One In particular, seting up an imap server on my home server which

I am currently building. I noted that Emailchemey has that built in.

Quote "You are using Foxmail v5.8, which is not on the list of email

file formats which Emailchemy can read; you may have to export your

email files in a format which Emailchemy can read." /endquote

There in was precisely where the quagmire was until I found this page...

http://www.foxmail4u.de/dloads.html

Unless your multilingual, which I am not, you'll need a google translation.

But on that page is a download for a tiny utilty called "fox to Box" which

did precisely what I needed.

Also, you asked what shareware solutions I had discovered ...

http://www.fookes.com/

A program called Mailbag assistant ...which I had tryed one time and

it works as advertised....but 50 bucks is just not in the budget right

now.

I gotta get ready for a meeting now, but I'll get back here this evening

and compare notes on some more details. But above all else ...thanks

a million for the help.

Jake

Edited March 9, 2010 by triger49

[Multibooter]

http://www.foxmail4u.de/dloads.html ... Unless your multilingual, which I am not, you'll need a google translation. But on that page is a download for a tiny utilty called "fox to Box"

I only saw box2fox "Tool, konvertiert Netscape Mailboxen zu FoxMail-Mailboxen", i.e. it converts from Netscape to Foxmail, which is probably not what you need.

http://www.fookes.com/

Very interesting find, actually Aid4Mail v1.994 http://www.aid4mail.com/specifications.php It seems to be able to read Foxmail email. As output, however, it apparently can only create .EML message files, which contain embedded attachments http://filext.com/faq/decode_eml_files.php The RFC-822 files I got from my Eudora mailboxes with Emailchemy were plain .txt, without embedded attachments.

You might have to get yourself Aid4Mail to convert your Foxmail emails to a more standard format, and Emailchemy to create a searchable folder with .txt message files. For me, the main advantage of using a searchable folder of .txt message files would be the absence of a learning curve with Win98 Find or WinXP Search. BTW, TweakUI can get rid of the annoying dog with the wagging tail in WinXP Search.

[triger49]

http://www.foxmail4u.de/dloads.html ... Unless your multilingual, which I am not, you'll need a google translation. But on that page is a download for a tiny utilty called "fox to Box"

I only saw box2fox "Tool, konvertiert Netscape Mailboxen zu FoxMail-Mailboxen", i.e. it converts from Netscape to Foxmail, which is probably not what you need.

Actually, it does, I did, and it worked. Sorry about that, In my haste to fire off a quick

reply, I did not fully explain that it is a 2-way utility. Fox to MBX or MBX to Fox.

Found it documented at > http://hazeleger.net/psjs_faqs/index.html

That guy use to provide European support for Foxmail till he discovered V 6.x

was phoning home all the time and dropped it. I thought the whole website had

vanished but it turned up on a google search. Anyway there is a section on migration

tools in the FAQ.

At that point I was able to do a simple test with Keynote Convert...

http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote_addons.html

For pure text emails, it's a thing of beauty. It also does batch text file import.

http://www.fookes.com/

Very interesting find, actually Aid4Mail v1.994 http://www.aid4mail.com/specifications.php It seems to be able to read Foxmail email. As output, however, it apparently can only create .EML message files, which contain embedded attachments http://filext.com/faq/decode_eml_files.php The RFC-822 files I got from my Eudora mailboxes with Emailchemy were plain .txt, without embedded attachments.

Another suggestion turned up from a techy friend, which would add an alternative.

http://luethje.eu/prog/index.htm

MBX to EML and EML to MBX . I have not experimented yet to find how they handle attachments.

They are command line utilities, and to the extent I have had time to tinker, they seem to work

well...although real fussy about syntax.

You might have to get yourself Aid4Mail to convert your Foxmail emails to a more standard format, and Emailchemy to create a searchable folder with .txt message files. For me, the main advantage of using a searchable folder of .txt message files would be the absence of a learning curve with Win98 Find or WinXP Search. BTW, TweakUI can get rid of the annoying dog with the wagging tail in WinXP Search.

That stupid tail wagging dog would have been better suited to an XP Disney version.

But anyway, still have some gray areas like attachments. that I need to sort out.

I really want to take time and look closer at Emailchemy also.

I knew of one guy who in working with the old Calypso client, finally ended up forwarding

all his emails to himself as attachments, just to avoid the headaches of conversion.

Jake

Edited March 10, 2010 by triger49

[Multibooter]

http://luethje.eu/prog/index.htm

Very good link. The Total Commander plugin mbox 1.10 seems interesting, although I am not sure whether it would help with your current problem.

MBX to EML and EML to MBX . I have not experimented yet to find how they handle attachments.

"Empfohlen in [=recommended by] c't" sounds good, c't is the top technically-oriented computer magazine in Germany, although my personal top choice is the more popular "PC Praxis" by Data Becker. German computer magazines are the best in any language, at least during the past 5 years.

still have some gray areas like attachments. that I need to sort out.

I would just ignore the attachments to make matters simple and keep them in a separate searchable folder. If an archived message is of interest lateron and contained an attachment, you might make a 2nd search for the attachment in the separate archived attachment folder. This would be a quick-and-dirty approach to archiving personal emails. One of my main objectives for archiving personal emails would be to create a clean archive free of viruses and trojans. Combining the archiving of messages and attachments might get complicated when for example an important message is clean, but its attachment is infected, or vice versa.

I knew of one guy who in working with the old Calypso client, finally ended up forwarding all his emails to himself as attachments, just to avoid the headaches of conversion

Not sure, perhaps information and dates in the original email header might get lost with this approach.

[triger49]

Apparently the link I posted took a bandwidth hit

and password protected all access .the files from

Foxmail4u are also available on this french site.

http://foxmail.free.fr/

Jake