Email Storage - Best Approach

[MarillionFan]

I use three email accounts across Hotmail & AOL and access them directly through the web, or via my Iphone, or I have outlook attach to the POP server where applicable.

Outlook on my machine is designed to copy across into a Personal File and back up all emails.

Anyway it aint working, because depending on where I read it, AOL will drop it to Recent & then it will delete it from Outlook.

What do others do to combine Email accounts, email and store them for prosperity?

[xoggoth]

No idea about the first part but as to "storing them for prosperity" I use my usual knocked up thing in Excel + vba to view archived mails if necessary.

Once the mails have been exported to a backup location, clicking a button lists all mails in all subdirectories with subject, date and from, decoding from base64 where necessary (HMRC always code their headers just to annoy people). Click on the email name opens the mail as text on a form for quick view and a button on that opens properly in mail.

Did it for Outlook Express, not got round to getting it to work with Windows Live mail yet and no idea if works with with proper Outlook but vba is dead simple so if you want to try it and mod if necessary it is here.

http://www.xoggoth.org/temp/mail%20list%205.xls

[fishslice]

Not sure about AOL but when I used to do this (now use an exchange hosted solution) it all came down to telling Outlook to download all email using IMAP rather POP3.

Try a search for AOL IMAP and see what that brings up.

Also have a read of IMAP on wiki at the following:
Internet Message Access Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IMAP supports both on-line and off-line modes of operation. E-mail clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This and other characteristics of IMAP operation allow multiple clients to manage the same mailbox. Most e-mail clients support IMAP in addition to POP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet service providers (ISPs) support IMAP.[3] IMAP offers access to the mail store. Clients may store local copies of the messages, but these are considered to be a temporary cache.

Extracted paragraph above shows the key difference between IMAP / POP - the pointer is the underlined section.

Hope that helps with pointing in the right direction.

fs