How does one archive email?
Sending everything to Gmail isn’t really an option; they might pack up shop any day of the week. Sticking with one client isn’t an option, because most of them are awful. I mean, I don’t want to save things with Thunderbird, or Pine, or MH, or Apple’s Mail.app, or any other tool that binds my data in a particular folder structure, place, etc. I don’t want something to export my mail as HTML, as that leaves me with readable, searchable mail that is not actually well-structured enough to be processed automatically.
I think I would settle for one of two kinds of tool:
- An IMAP/POP to XML email archiver. I’d be happy if all my email ended up in a mess of XML documents; those I could easily manipulate in a variety of ways (Scheme scripts, XSLT) to process and display in a number of ways.
- A Postgres or MySQL datastore. Perhaps an SQLite file would be better; in any case, if the tables are well documented, I can (again) process it any way I want.
Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a tool that does this. Nothing that is affordable ($20-75), cross-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux), capable of running on the local client or as a service, and most importantly, that leaves my data in an open, manipulable format. Zoe is interesting and all, but it is a nightmare to use; I never have any idea what it is doing, and that scares me.
Perhaps I’ll do a bit more research; it seems like a simple, fundamental service that would matter to a lot of people, but it simply doesn’t exist.