Good Morning.
Is there a way to archive emails, most of them with attachments, of the last ten years – approximately 150.000 – in a way to get each email as a PDF file in a separate folder/group, and with all of the attachments of the respective email as separate PDF files within the respective folder/group as well?
At the moment all of these emails has been stored in a dtBase2 database file in eml format.
Thanks in advance! And kind regards, Friedrich
Not easily, no. This would be a very complicated thing to try and pull off.
I think the first thing I would do is ask myself, “Do I really need 150,000 emails etc. archived in DevonThink or anywhere for that matter?” The answer may well be yes if they are to do with research or historically important—there could be a valid reason but my experience is that a lot of data that once was important is no longer so. I have recently been through old emails and trashed most of them and now am much more discerning in what I keep. Those that I do think worth keeping I put in a “Pending” folder in the email app itself, (Spark) and every month review them again, delete some and copy/paste the others into a text file and import into DevonThink. Works for me!
Here are mandatory legal reasons for archiving this data for at least ten years.
I once used an email archiver app that converted emails to pdf files and if I recall correctly, placed all attachments in a folder/subfolder for each message. Unfortunately I abandoned that app a long time ago. Hopefully someone here might remember the app, or you could do a google search.
Ah yes, Email Archiver Pro. Used it last in 2014. I don’t remember why I didn’t warm up to it in the end. Could be the pdf files it created did not include working web links found inside emails? Whatever, it did create archives as pdf files. And attachments were put in subfolders.
If you have legal requirements for archiving, you might want to review the solution you choose with your attorney or authorizing official. Normally, there are chain-of-custody requirements – the ability to prove, for example, that headers have not been tampered with, etc., that the archive could not be modified, and so on. Professional applications such as ProofPoint can meet the requirements. Merely copying an email to a PDF does not demonstrate unbroken chain of custody.
Thank you for pointing that out. The program did exactly what I had in mind. I exported the emails from the database to a directory in the Finder and then completely converted them to emails. Mission completed.
Thank you and kind regards, Friedrich
Glad to hear it. 