By the way, SoftSpire tries to pass off this exact same program as its own. Sadly it’s not very powerful: you can only open a single folder at a time (no tree browsing or recursion), there’s no search at all, and the renderer usually screws up formatting. Michal Mutl’s Mail Viewer is a compact free program that requires no installation. It’s not terribly useful, though, since attachments are inaccessible.
This trick works because IE web archives use the same MIME format as EML files. mht and open the file in Internet Explorer. Here’s what I found in my quest for an EML viewer application running on Windows.įirst the oddball option, discovered by Erik Kangas: simply change the file extension from. Surely there’s an abundance of great free viewer applications so we don’t need to reimport our exported messages into an e-mail client just to read them, right? Wrong. So we have a simple widespread export format. There’s a built-in export facility, but I recommend the powerful Import Export Tools, a Thunderbird extension by Paolo “Kaosmos.” His tools can export entire folders at once, build a convenient HTML index, and start each EML file name with the message date for easy sorting. Exporting messages from Thunderbird to EML files is easy, too. This format is very widely supported and stores each message as an individual human-readable file, complete with any metadata and attachments. The best archive format for e-mail messages is obvious: plain text in MIME format, using the standard extension. (Thunderbird uses mboxrd, a modified mbox format.)
I’m not too happy storing long-term archives in one program’s idiosyncratic databases, either.
But independence from specific e-mail clients is one of IMAP’s advantages, and Thunderbird’s future is dubious since Mozilla has demoted the project to maintenance mode. With IMAP everything is stored remotely by default, unless moved explicitly to local folders. With POP everything is stored locally, so the archive was naturally part of the local folders in my Thunderbird installation. Having recently switched my e-mail accounts from POP to IMAP (highly recommended!), I wondered what to do with my archived e-mail.
0 kommentar(er)
