Re: Questions regarding archiving emails Listers, I hope someone can advise me on how they archive their saved emails. I use Outlook Express as my email program. I have over 1,000 emails saved in labeled "folders" in my Outlook Express program. They have been labeled with a family surname or an individual's name, or by a locality, such as "NJ Sussex Co.", "PA Lycoming Co.", etc. Then I have over 2,000 emails in my SENT file -- genealogy emails I have sent since 2002. Not all of these need to be saved, but there are too many to re-read, sort, and then delete or save. I thought I would just dump them onto a CD and decide later. I have never done this, so I hope it is do-able. My IN BOX runneth over. I have over 1,600 emails received and saved since 2002 that are still in my IN BOX that have to be dealt with (i.e. I have to re-read them then decide either to delete them or save them. They just never made it to one of the folders. The time has come to archive these emails -- at least those that have already been saved and organized into file folders and the SENT emails -- and take them off my hard drive. I plan to copy them to re-writeable CDs before I delete them permanently. HAS ANYONE ON THE LIST DONE THIS? DOES ANYONE HAVE SUGGESTIONS? IS THERE A DIFFERENT WAY? How do you archive the genealogy emails you want to save permanently for reference? There are just too many to print and then file paper copies. I may do this later with some, which is why I thought I should use re-writeable CDs. EMAIL ATTACHMENTS. Documents, photos, group sheets, and other information have been sent to me as email attachments. Right now I am wading thru these emails and printing the attachments before I archive the emails with their attachments. (Belt and suspenders approach.) Helen

To Helen and those interested, I just went through this exercise back in October after I purchased a new computer when my old one was dying. I tried to export my Outlook Express files onto the new computer, but that did not work - different versions of OE and I could not make it work. I took that to mean that if I saved the files (in the .dbx format used by Outlook Express) to a CD or transferred them to an external drive, that I would not be able to use the files. Outlook Express has an "Export" feature which will export messages from Express to Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange. I didn't have either program, so I didn't use that option. I had hoped to find a utility to convert all the files to a text file with few commands, but was unsuccessful. I finally did what you don't want to do -- I went through the messages one at a time and saved them as text files in a directory structure that was the same as my Outlook Express folder structure. I probably had upwards of 4000 messages in my whole system. I opened each email, then went to <File> <Save As> and clicked Text (when given the choice) and typed in a unique file name for each file. I also saved all of the attachments. It is a tedious and arduous process, but at least I have my correspondence (and attached files!) for the past six years in a text format that I can transfer to any other computer system in the future. While doing this, I used file names that identified the correspondent and the date sent (e.g., Helen-20050403.txt) and my response might be (Helen-RS-20050404.txt). Or you could use a sequential number to identify separate emails (e.g., Helen-01-20050403.txt). You could save them also as separate Outlook Express files with an .eml extension - they will open in Outlook Express, assuming your current version of OE is compatible with the file created earlier. I considered the idea of transferring all of them from and to a correspondent into an MSWord document, but I would have had to type the email date and subject for each one. Having done all that, I then backed all of the message files up on a CD stored away from home and on my expternal hard drive at home. There may be an easier way to accomplish this, and I would appreciate any suggestions to make it easier to do it. My method was "brute force and awkwardness" but I at least have my data in usable files for the foreseeable future. Cheers -- Randy Researching KNAPP and AUBLE in NJ Sussex County.