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Thu, 22 Aug 2002
Archiving Email with Eudora
Eudora may not be the prettiest or most user-friendly email client, but it has a few very significant advantages: it can handle a large amount of email, since it uses plain text to store email it can't suffer database corruption, and it can search much faster than anything else.
Here's how you can take advantage of it for archiving your email.
I used Eudora Pro for many years, but after switching to MacOS X I started looking at other email clients & I eventually switched to MS Entourage X. I also looked at a lot of email archiving applications, mostly based on FileMaker Pro, and couldn't find one I liked.
After a database corruption scare and noticing that Entourage slowed down a lot when the database contains a huge amount of email, I switched back to Eudora a few months ago.
Using Eudora's fast search feature, you can archive email by date to a separate folder. To do this, bring up the search window (command-option-F), select "date is before" the earliest date you want to keep in your active mailboxes, hilight the folders you want to archive, and press the Search button.
In a few seconds you'll see the result list with all email in that date range. Type Command-A to select the entire result list, and using the transfer menu, transfer it to either a newly created mailbox or an existing mailbox.
You can then move that mailbox out of your Eudora folder, and when you want to use it select "Other..." from the mailbox folder to open it. Using the search window, you can easily find any message in the archive.
If you're using Entourage, you can export mailboxes to Eudora to take advantage of this capability by simply dragging them to the desktop.