austraLasia #2451

Mission critical

ROME: 30th June 2009 -- Nobody would deny that email is 'mission critical' today.  Nobody would deny that it is the primary written communications medium in use on a daily basis. So what happens to most of our email in the longer term?  It stays with the 'client' we employ to write it and receive it, be that Outlook/Express, Thunderbird, Google...... until such time as we either delete it, or it gets deleted, by accident or the inevitable computer crash.  I know.  It happened to me just a week ago - the crash, I mean, not necessarily the deletion.  And hence my point.

    Let me put this in an even more dramatic way.  You will find, on SDL, the 6,000 letters of Don Cimatti, and 5,000 or thereabouts of Don Rua - the work is unfinished. Sure, they were different times, different circumstances.  Would we be so confident, though, of finding 6,000 items of digital correspondence of anybody, let alone a candidate for the Altars, over the past ten or twenty years?  Almost certainly not.  And there lies the problem.

    There is a solution.  It is a simple solution which saved me from disaster when I could have 'lost' three months worth of email. In fact I did NOT lose three months worth of email.  I lost some, but only ones that probably were worth losing anyway.
    The solution involves a principle which has three associated elements:

(1) make sure you can get your email and its attachments outside of, beyond your email client,
(2) make sure that once they are outside they can still be associated, that is, you can tell what email refers to which attachments and
(3) ensure that you attend to this matter on a systematic basis.  None of it can be truly automated.

    The fact is that whatever email client you are using, it will offer the first two possibilities as add-ons.  If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express you may have to pay for the add-on - but you paid for the email client anyway, so the logical consequence is you pay for the next step. If you are using Thunderbird or some other free and open option, it will not cost you anything. I will explain what I do, which is a free (as in beer) choice.

    I use Thunderbird as an email client.  I have added an add-on called AttachmentExtractor.  AE, as we'll call it from here on - remember, it has its equivalents in other Email Clients - permits me to create a folder anywhere I like, probably away from my current computer on a portable hard disk. 
    From there on it is simple.  When I receive or send an email that I judge to be worth preserving (ultimately only a human being can make that judgement), I simply highlight it in the Inbox and click AE. At that point the email and its attachments are copied to the chosen folder.  The email is copied as an html file, therefore 'text only' and accessible to anything that can read text. It contains a reference to its attachments. The attachments are saved in their particular format (doc, ppt, jpg whatever) in the same folder. Of course I include 'sent' emails in this activity.  It's of little value if you only save one side of the process! 
    I also do one small extra thing - I use the 'tag' option in the email client to remind me, with a chosen colour, that I have copied the email to somewhere else . Or I simply delete the email at that point.
    Then weekly, I go to the folder and make a second decision on the saved correspondence, as to whether I really want to keep it and if so, where, or how I want to keep it.  That will mostly mean keeping it in digital form, occasionally in paper form.
   
Following the above procedure resolves the issue. It requires a combination of readily available technology and a little personal discipline.
For those who keep email on Google - a simple word of advice.  Do not trust this process in the long term.  It will save unlimited amounts of email for now, and for nothing.  But Google has been known to 'lose' email too.  I receive Gmail, but all Gmail is redirected to Thunderbird where the above processes go into action.
   
    If you want any help with this, feel free to ask. 
    jbf.

  _________________
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Title: australasia 2451
Subject and key words: SDB General: saving email
Date (year): 2009
ID: 2000-2099|2451