Archiving Outlook emails for immortals

If your place of work is worthy of the title workplace then your emails are being regularly backed up to guard against the occasional volcano or former colleague going postal. However, if you want an archive for yourself, so that in twenty years you can reminisce with your cat about the great joke email from your buddy in security, what options do you have?

My first stop in creating long term email archives is usually Mozilla Thunderbird. For some years I've had an annual routine of retrieving all of my Gmail via POP, which Thunderbird stores in the standard mbox format. I then archive the Thunderbird profile. To look through those emails I can restore the profile and view them in Thunderbird, or in any of dozens of other mbox-compatible programs.

Incidentally, since late last year Google have offered, through their Takeout service, a direct mbox download, thereby removing the most time-consuming part of the process. Of course, you may just put your trust in the cloud, and rely on Google to back up your data, for Google and Gmail to always exist, and for your account to always work.

That's Gmail sorted, but what about Microsoft Outlook, which you're forced to use at work? If your mailbox is on the company exchange server, then you'll want to export your emails to a PST file, but how will you read that PST file at home? This is a proprietary format from Microsoft, which doesn't bode well for long term readability. Investigating the Thunderbird option, if you run Thunderbird on a machine with Outlook installed then it should be able to import the Outlook emails into Thunderbird. Fortuitously this did not work for me, forcing me to look for other options.

It's not often that I come across software that entirely meets, and far exceeds, my needs and even my wants, but MailStore Home does this. If someone had asked me to come up with a wishlist of what features my dream email archiving software would have it would barely make a dent in the feature list of MailStore Home. In summary, I like it.

Archive from many sources (click to embiggen)

There is a non-free commercial version, the miracles of which it performs I can't begin to imagine, but for my needs the Home version is perfect. I initially downloaded it with thoughts of using it to retrieve my emails from Outlook and poke them into Thunderbird, but it offers a much better solution.

To begin with, and this really is a delightful feature to discover in any software, when installing it allows you to choose a portable version. This means the software and its data, your emails, is self-contained within a particular folder, and this folder can be copied to USB drives or DVD or any other location, and run from there on another computer without requiring installation.

Read archived emails

Search archived emails

Within the software itself you have three main facilities. Firstly, you can archive emails, which downloads them from whatever system you point it at, from local email clients such as Outlook or from web-based email services such as Gmail. This stores the emails in MailStore's own data store, so you can archive or just copy the MailStore folder for your complete backup. Note that the first time you do an archive it may take a while to retrieve all of the emails. For thousands of Outlook emails it took my PC about six hours, but I just let it run in the background. If you run the archive function again it'll be much quicker as it only retrieves the new emails.

Once you have the emails in MailStore you can read or search them. The original folder structure is maintained, attachments are kept, and the emails themselves are formatted as they were in Outlook or whatever your original system was. This is a much better system for perusal after some years than worrying about archived mbox files! And if you do have archived mbox files, just load them into MailStore to easily browse or search through them. You can also delete unwanted emails, so unwanted missives about the car with its headlights left on downstairs need not be kept for eternity.

Export archived emails

The third facility is to export the emails, again into any of a multitude of systems. As I noted I was intending to export to Thunderbird, but because of the great email reading functionality provided by MailStore I have not had the need to use the export.

MailStore Home is not the sort of software I will use much, but I am very happy to reply on it for my occasional crucially important email backups. And in twenty years I am sure Mr Tiddles and I will find great delight in using it.