Archiving e-mail in XML format (Netscape 4.7)

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Take a look at BoilerBase, a search and indexing tool that can operate over Netscape mail files directly, or work as a POP3 interceptor, or… (it has almost too many options). Still “two worlds,” though.

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Hey,
does someone have any experience in joining files and e-mails in one system? Software providing document management facilities might do, but I’ld first like to explore other paths…

Preferably, a good organisation & archiving of e-mail follows the structure of your directory structure. But still, then, you have everything in ‘seperate worlds. I would like to solve this by storing the mails & attachments on my pc or network. This should be done in a way that the e-mail is still searchable enough,… Moreover, this should reduce the migration efforts in case of a move to another e-mail software program…

Untill now, I’m experimenting by storing the mails as emyymmdd_from_to.txt & emyymmdd_from_to_attachment.xxx. But this most probably is a dead end which won’t work for general use…

I’ve read some seminar articles about the idea to store e-mails as XML files. The idea: most e-mail software products provide an export facility to store your e-mail as a txt file. As such, it’s a ‘small’ step to a facility which stores as a XML codes txt file, containing tags for all fields (from, to, cc, bcc, date, subject, body,…), optional contextual information and also a tag for the attachment(s) storage location (?), which guarantees the link to the those file(s), which need to be detached from the e-mail during the storage process. Files can be read by anything (based on) a (html?/)xml viewer. (I’ll skip here more technical details, conditions,…). The author suggested that the leeding software products should once develop features or extensions to make this possible.

Does anyone know yet of such things available/in development?

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Take a look at Wilbur, a freeware utility that I swear by. See post 20401
Cheers,

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Thanks for the suggestions!
(Freeware) Wilbur looks great at first sight. I don’t know yet how to incorporate this in an ‘outside the mailing software’ email archiving strategy, but that’s a next step. Anyway, I see immediately already some very interesting issues to apply it on too.
I didn’t have the chance to check out (not freeware) Boiler base though, but printed out the web site content for an easy read on the train, in case it offers better features… I’ll try to remember this thread and add more value if I find some other interesting alternatives.
So thanks again – you’re on the edge of saving a group plenty of time!

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>>I don’t know yet how to incorporate this in an ‘outside the mailing software’ email archiving strategy, but that’s a next step.

All Netscapes email are contained in text files named Inbox, Sent, etc. I just created an index in Wilbur that searched only those files. Also, I take the individual files (Sent, etc.) & put them in a zip file that I mark with the date (e.g. 030416Email.zip). Then, within Netscape, you can delete all the emails prior to that date, knowing that they are archived. I have Wilbur search, not only current emails, but also the archives at the same time. If you find what you need in the archive, just open it in a text editor.
Cheers,

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