Email Archive
From Eugene Eric Kim's Wiki
A decent email archiving solution has been the Holy Grail for me for sometime. I'm going to consolidate some of my many notes here and add some new ones.
Contents |
Brainstorm
- Integration into CRM systems, or CRM-like functionality.
- Store everything in mbox, with metadata in database. Possibly use eyebrowse schema. Also examine Email::Store. Storing as mbox enables me to read archives in mail clients or via IMAP. Separate into incoming and outgoing mailboxes by month. Messages only archived once.
- Tags. Can be used to define project archives. Can export these as mboxes.
- Archive. A proper mailing list archiver could be used for personal archives as well.
- Collab:Social Network analysis. Who's in my social network based on a window of time?
Features
- Addressability. Every email has an address, possibly based on message-ID. Functionality probably enabled by web archives. Could potentially use XRI. Addressability lets me annotate, integrate with other PIM apps, etc. Obviously want granular addressability as well, perhaps via Forge:Purple Numbers.
- Access control via i-names. Message-by-message access policy, or if I'm really ambitious, granular access control (i.e. paragraphs in emails). Tag policy. Basically, access control is tied to addresses. So threads would have an address, tagged archives would have an address, individual emails would have an address, etc. Hence, all of these things are access controllable.
- Map email addresses to individuals. A search for Eugene Eric Kim would turn up emails from hcs.harvard.edu, ddj.com, blueoxen.org, eekim.com, etc.
- Reporting. How quickly do I respond to individuals? What times do I send email? Some of this stuff may not be appropriate for archives, because I don't archive all email.
Sorting Mailboxes
Tips and Tricks
mutt searching: Use 'l' to do 'limit' searches and use ~t, ~f, and ~b in AND combinations to limit on To: From: and body of messages. It's lovely only having to look in one place!
Tools
- archivemail
- Emailchemy -- converts different formats to RFC2822.
- grepmail
- mairix
- mbox2mysql
- zoe
- http://www.emailman.com/conversion/ -- tools for converting between mailbox formats
