Need App to Automatically Archive Several Hundred MB of Old Eudora Mail

March 4, 2004 1:15 PM

Eudora has been my email client since, oh, 1994. I now have several hundred megabytes of mail. It's disappointing that Eudora doesn't have an "archiving" feature like Outlook. Does anyone know of a utility that's up to the task? Doing with manually with over 35 folders is painful.
posted by madman to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Not an app, but very easy:

Create a folder called "archive", drag your old, unwanted mail from the existing folders to the new folder, burn the .toc and .mbx files to CD, delete the .toc and .mbx.

Sure, it's manual, but it would only take about 5 minutes. I've been doing it once a year. If you need to go back and grab old emails you can just plop the files back into the app directory.
posted by y6y6y6 at 2:00 PM on March 4, 2004

Alternatively, just delete your old mail, since you know you're never going to look at it again anyway.

I have a folder called "Saved Messages" into which I drag messages I explicitly deem worthy of saving. Most everything else gets automatically deleted no more than 90 days after I receive it -- sooner for some folders (e.g. spam only lasts a week). There are a few folders I prune manually (e.g. folders for particular projects I'm working on). Periodically I even prune the "Saved Messages"; I probably don't need those registration codes for Mac OS 9 shareware anymore, for instance.

Attachment to things you don't really need is the root cause of suffering. Letting go is the path to contentment.
posted by kindall at 5:16 PM on March 4, 2004

Not free, but my tech guru uses Mailbag ASsistant and has for years.
posted by billsaysthis at 6:08 PM on March 4, 2004

also not free but very good for this very task:

AskSam is a weird cross between a word processor and a database. The result is a free form non structured database not bound by forms, structures etc.

More on point though is that it has a filter for slurpingnup an entire Eudora mailbag of folders. You can make powerful searches through same.

I have it and use it for this and its a lot better than just keeping it in Eudora, which chokes a bit since I've been using as long as you have.
posted by Fupped Duck at 9:10 PM on March 4, 2004

my biggest problem with eudora is the fact that all attachments get placed in the same directory. this makes archiving extremely difficult because simply archiving a .mbx and .toc only archives the email messages but not the attachments, thus it doesn't free up that much space.
posted by chrisroberts at 9:54 PM on March 4, 2004