© 2010, copyright Michelle Goodrum Most of us have heard the saying, "You've Got Mail!" As genealogists and family historians that saying takes on a whole new meaning. In our endeavors to document our work, we collect not only photos, letters, birth certificates, and all sorts of other paper documents but also the electronic kind. That includes email.Mine is out of control. Mainly it's because I haven't been able to decide what to do with it. You see, several years ago, I had this system. All of my mail came into Outlook Express. I would save the email, along with any attachments, as an Outlook Express file in whatever family folder on my computer was appropriate. That worked pretty well although I did worry that someday I might not be able to open the Outlook Express file due to changes in technology. So I would also save it as a .txt file. There was a problem with that however, in that if there had been an attachment to the email neither the attachment nor the name of the attached file was saved in the .txt format. I figured between the 2 systems I was probably OK. And I was. Until my hard drive crashed...
Most of my stuff was backed up so it was just a big hassle. However, we decided going forward to leave our email "in the cloud" with our Internet Service Provider. It's easier that way since we access our email from different computers. But what to do with the genealogy email? I really prefer to save those with the rest of my genealogy files.
In the last several years since that hard drive crash, I've just been accumulating those genealogy related emails in a family folder "in the cloud" that is my ISP. Ugh! I need to do something, anything!
In the last several years since that hard drive crash, I've just been accumulating those genealogy related emails in a family folder "in the cloud" that is my ISP. Ugh! I need to do something, anything!
Recently, someone (I'm sorry I can't remember who) suggested saving emails as PDF files. That way, the file can be saved with the rest of my genealogy files and if there were any attachments, the file name for the attachment is preserved within the body of the email. PDF has become so standard that it, hopefully, is unlikely to go away. At least not anytime soon... The best part is that it should be E-A-S-Y to do.
Just to be safe, maybe I'll save them as .txt files too...
Just to be safe, maybe I'll save them as .txt files too...
I'm curious, how do you handle your genealogy related email files?
