holy ancient emails, batman!

As of recent I’ve been doing a lot of email archiving research for work, such as move mails from Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail to Mozilla Thunderbird to Hotmail to Gmail, etc. I also did research on how to download mail from any webmail provider as well.

During this research it occurred to me..

Wait a sec. I have emails dating all the way back from 2001 stored on CD. I wonder if I can import those into Thunderbird?

begin nerdy history/conversion explanation here

(If you don’t like/don’t care reading the nerdy crapola, skip to the next page at the bottom.)

The discs

It turns out I had not one but three CDs of ancient emails. Two were archives from 2001, the other from 2002.

And I was able to get all the mail data off of them. Every single mail.

The way I was able to get these emails all imported into t-bird was nothing short of miraculous.

First, all three CDs were damaged. They were scratched and pitted. But luck was on my side and I was able to recover all the mail data from each disc. I converted them all to disc image files via Nero Burning ROM, so now if the discs go beyond repair, I’m not worried because I have image backups.

The data conversions

Discs 1 and 3 were Eudora 5.1 mail archives. Actually, I can’t really call them archives per sé because they were simply copies of the MBOX files, directories and file attachments.

Thunderbird can easily import Eudora MBOX file data – however it does not associate the file attachments with mails, so some of the mails I imported had the text but no attachments were there any. For those wondering why this is, Eudora was purposely designed to put file attachments in a separate directory per mail account called “attach”. Weird? Yes. But that’s the way Eudora did it. This didn’t concern me too much because the PST archive covered most of the missing pieces.

Speaking of which, disc 2 was a Microsoft Outlook PST (i.e. “Personal Folder” archive). This was either from Outlook 98 or Outlook 2000. Most likely 2000.

Fortunately I had a copy of the MS Office 2000 suite. I loaded up Outlook 2000, imported the entire archive, then exported/imported to Outlook Express 6, then exported all the EML files out, then imported into Mozilla Thunderbird.

It all worked. All the EML files had the correct timestamps, complete full file attachments and not a single one was corrupted. I’m amazed it worked.

The craziness of it all…

Two of the discs were burned in early 2001. This means at the time I performed the backup originally I was using Windows 98 because I didn’t get XP until later in the year (2001 was the first year XP came to market).

As I recall, I had a 2x CD burner made by Creative Labs. I had no accessibility to USB back then. It was either floppies or CDs.

You also have to realize that these CDs are eight years old.

Like I said, the fact I got all this mail into t-bird now in 2009 is miraculous. It should not have worked. The discs were not well kept whatsoever. I found all three of them in a stack of discs with no jewel cases, no paper sleeves, nothing. Just in a stack.

Ready for a trip down memory lane?

I found a lost of history in the emails I recovered. Some happy, some sad, some just plain weird.

Go to the next page to get the scoop on what I found.

This article is divided into pages
Go to page: 1 2 3

Copyright ©1975-2009 menga - Today is Tuesday, March 16 2010; the time when you loaded this web page was 11:45pm UTC. This blog is authored from Tampa Florida - a place where all the cool people are :-) If this web site has not been updated in the past 30 days, you can safely assume I'm sick, dead or finally got a life interesting enough to get away from the computer. On a final note, remember to save your shit.