this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I still have every email I've ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn't terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.
I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don't need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn't on the Open web or anything and doesn't support SMTP. It's just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.
I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.
Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I'll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the
/2023folder on the archive.Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.
@danielquinn @crank That's pretty cool. How much storage does 20 years of personal emails actually take up?
It's actually not as crazy as you might think:
That's going back to ~~2000~~ 1995, both sent & received. The first email I have in there is from a friend of mine offering to send me an MP3 she downloaded.
You were downloading and sharing mp3s in 1995?? Didn’t the file extension only come out in 1995?
Wikipedia says it was 1991.
I think she would have gotten the file via hot... something, this little file sharing network that predates Napster.
Edit: It was probably Hotline, which was launched in '97, so there's probably some corruption to the received email date somewhere. I wasn't exactly tech savvy 25 years ago ;-)
I think the codec came out in 91 but the file extension was determined in 95, according to Wikipedia:
The filename extension .mp3 was chosen by the Fraunhofer team on 14 July 1995 (previously, the files had been named .bit).
I wasn’t intending to doubt you, I was just surprised. Either way that’s pretty cool! It’s fun looking back in the old days of the internet. All I was doing in 95 was playing CD-ROMs and occasionally browsing AOL, having no idea what it was or how it worked.
My favourite games at that time were Recess in Greece, The Incredible Machine, and some DK Educational games.
I also have a good memory of my dad pirating Windows 98 with his friend. I later challenged the morals of it and he ended up buying it a license. Little did I know that I would become quite the sailer of high seas myself in only a few years time. I think I downloaded my first mp3 in 2001, maybe 2002, and now have a library of almost 100,000 mp3s and flacs. Good times!
@danielquinn Is that just for text or also for images & attachments? Either way, yeah, 13G is a tiny amount of space when you consider how much info is in there! I wish I had done something similar.
In most cases, it's everything. I've made mistakes over the years, screwing up a transfer or when migrating between servers, and I expect I probably lost some attachments here and there, but yeah, it's everything.