A friend wrote this week with a query he hoped the ProfHacker community could help with:
I need to selectively archive e-mail from Entourage. I would like it to be searchable by Spotlight, and would like to be able to recover it either in a different application or, in Entourage, without switching “identities.” Ideally these archived e-mail would be in a format that’s not dependent on the long-term prospects of Entourage. It needs to be pretty easy to do, or I won’t bother.
A few stipulations: 1. He teaches at a university that forbids the automatic forwarding of e-mail to a 3rd-party account, such as Gmail. 2. In some instances, this needs to be done as a batch process–some of these e-mails go back a decade.
Any tips?
More generally, the widespread habit of using e-mail as institutional memory is . . . not good. Let me re-phrase that: E-mail does contain lots of helpful information that’s worth preserving, but e-mail programs aren’t the best place to keep that information. (My wife and I have an old computer that we’ve moved all over the east coast because it has a copy of Eudora Pro that has a bunch of old e-mail we don’t want to get rid of. That’s probably not a smart, or a scalable, strategy.)
We’re less interested here in how your university as a whole manages this. Let’s take it as read that they probably have some system in place that would help them in the case of, for example, the discovery process in a lawsuit. How do you archive information sent in e-mail? Is “buried in an Entourage folder” the best we can do?
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An update from earlier this week: A little birdie–ok, my father–pointed me to the policy page of Tidewater Community College, which stipulates that policies and by-laws will be posted online, with an effective date, and with a notation that indicates when it was reviewed. Changes will be indicated, and unchanged policies will be marked as such. While they get demerits for using PDFs for printing (instead of a printer-ready style sheet), that’s pretty robust.
Image by flickr user idogcow / CC licensed
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5 Responses to Institutional Memory II: What about that e-mail . . . ?
Tom Burkholder - October 2, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Google desktop indexes the emails in Entourage. Some people apparently prefer it to the search function in Entourage.
Josh - October 2, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Sticking with the adage that “institutional memory is not good to store in email,” I have found using third-party services/software like Evernote are really helpful. Although Evernote is ostensibly note-taking software, it allows the importation of all kinds of information: websites, hand-typed notes, images, and even emails. There is no batch option, unfortunately, but one can copy-and-paste individual email messages into Evernote, which then syncs between an online version and a desktop client (with a Mac OS X version), as well as other devices like iPhones, etc. While this works great for an individual, the online version also allows certain content to be shared, hence how this might work as a form of institutional memory that more members of the institution might access.
The service and software are all free, with a limit of uploading 50 MB of note data per month. A paid version costs $50 a year with unlimited upload amounts (I think…I have never paid for the unlimited service). Details can be found at this site: http://www.evernote.com
Hope that helps! It doesn’t solve all the problems, granted…
Nels P. Highberg - October 2, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Jason, I have a flash drive with Eudora Pro on it that I use for emails that are on another flash drive. I used to love, love, love Eudora, but then I switched to Mac in 2006 for various reasons but put Eudora on a drive just so I could access certain emails in case I needed them for my tenure dossier, which I did not need. But I’ve still got them!
My email now is entirely Gmail, which we have previously discussed is not always possible for people at state schools or those that require use of university email systems.
dance - October 4, 2009 at 11:51 am
I use Projects in Entourage as a system of category flags–eg, as I receive email related to re-doing our dept website, I tag it with the project Website, and generally know that anything in a project should not be purged. But my archive is basically Entourage–periodically I duplicate and zip the identity. Neither method is particularly reliable, and is only accessible by me.
Re the OP: Hmm. Recovering the email in Entourage without switching identities is pretty much the antithesis of archiving–that’s just leaving the email where it is and deleting around it. (By the way, Spotlight searches Entourage—am not familiar with Google Desktop to know whether it would improve matters.) Entourage has excellent script support and the non-home version has automator actions, and so whatever process is decided, it ought to be possible to write a script to act on selected emails and then assign a keyboard shortcut to that script.
A quick test suggests that emails printed to PDF are indexed and searchable by spotlight, and those include some email to/from/date/time metadata. (The OP did not stipulate metadata, but surely something is necessary?) There does not seem to be a Convert to PDF automator action for Entourage, though there is for Word. Printing to a PDF printer might work. There is a Save As File action, which one-click saves a message as a Entourage Mail file that pretends it needs to be opened in Erage, but produces a plain text file with maybe-too much metadata when dragged onto TextEdit. That has some promise–I’ve got it to the point of selecting multiple messages in the preview list and it saves each one as a separate file, subject=title, into predefined folder, without further intervention. Unfortunately Spotlight does not appear to be indexing the content, though I’ve not seriously tested that.
DevonThink Pro will archive email so that’s something to investigate—I have not used it, but they promise to import it all from Entourage and automatically index it, which should make it easier to delete around the email you want. Do not know about formats used, nor what happens to metadata. DevonThink Pro competes in the same niche as Evernote, without the cloud aspect.
I don’t think I’d bother going to the trouble of generating lots of individual email files as an archive, myself. Proprietary databases get used because they are efficient. MS is a big company, and if the Entourage format dies (I believe MacOutlook 2010 may be changing the database as well as renaming the product), there will be at least a version or so that will import it into the next thing, and a window of 2-3 years to do it, at minimum. Seems reasonable to me to assume you will convert data you touch every day—it’s stagnant data where you really have to worry about file formats.
Pat Gehrke - October 7, 2009 at 11:37 am
One simple and entirely automated solution would be to set up a GMail account, have it pop-fetch your email but leave all the emails it fetches on the server. The materials would not be sorted, but there would be a practically infinite amount of storage and a robust keyword search engine if you needed to pull something from the archives.
The biggest problems I see with using email as your institutional memory are the localization of email files to your client (as opposed to keeping them server-side), the restriction on many email accounts’ server space (which at our university is quite small), and the ease of access to the material. A cloud-based email function like GMail helps with all three. They provide server-side hosting of emails so any web-enabled device can fetch your old emails, the current storage limit on my email account is a little over 7gb, and the combination of folders, labels, and keyword searching makes it pretty easy for me to organize and find old materials. I even email files and documents to myself and put keywords in the text of the email, then tag it and send it to a folder in GMail as a means of archiving paperwork, forms, etc.