Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- email:archive:overview [2025/09/02 17:21] – removed - external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
+++ email:archive:overview [2025/09/02 18:17] (current) – rodolico
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+====== Archiving E-mail Overview ======
+===== Summary =====
+Most e-mail setups (server and client combination) do not perform well when an e-mail account has too many messages. For example, Microsoft Outlook and other e-mail clients perform poorly if there are more than 1000 messages in the Inbox. Reducing that to 500 will increase the responsiveness of your system, and increasing past 2000 will create a system that drags.
+While many mail programs have built in archiving systems, the mail is stored on your local computer and, if your local computer fails, you lose all of your e-mail.
+Daily Data has an archiving system which will avoid this, while keeping your old mail available and backed up. Contact us for additional information.
+<WRAP center round alert 60%>
+Warning: To use this system, the username and password for both your active and archives e-mail accounts must be stored on the server which manages the archiving process. While we make all efforts to keep that information private, it is highly recommended that these passwords not be used in any other locations.
+</WRAP>
+===== In Depth =====
+E-mail is stored on the server as files; one file per e-mail messages. Folders in your e-mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, Webmail, etc…) are actually folders on the server itself.
+When your e-mail program is opened, it must read information about all messages in your Inbox. Microsoft Outlook, and other e-mail programs, actually try to do a full index of each message and keep them in your computers memory all of the time.
+– 1000 messages are easy to handle. The conversation between the mail server and your e-mail client is minimal, and very fast. And, since Microsoft Outlook only keeps your some data on messages in you Inbox in memory, it does not degrade your system with those messages.
+However, with many more messages than that, you increase the amount of information exchanged between the server and your computer, and with some programs, increase the amount of memory required when the program is running.
+Additionally, most e-mail programs have a search function, which can search all messages in a particular folder, all messages in a tree, or even all messages in your account. When you use this, the amount of information which must be passed between the server and the client can result in a very slow set of results.
+===== How it works =====
+We create one or more “archive” accounts for you. You can access this account through your existing mail client, by installing a new client, or through webmail.
+We then set up the information in our archiving process and, once a week (currently on Friday), we will automatically move messages from your active account to your archive account.
+===== What to move and how to save it =====
+We are set up to archive “old messages”, but you then decide what the term “old” means. If you rarely access e-mail older than 6 months, that defines “old” for you. **Hint**: be conservative here. If you decide on 6 months, then discover you really need a year in your active account, it is very difficult to reverse this in some cases.
+You then decide what form you want the archive account to store information in. If you are someone who just likes to leave all your mail in the Inbox, you may choose to have your archive create a hierarchy where everything is stored by year and month. If you like to have things in specific directories, you may want to keep that structure. You can use any combination of year, month and original path in your archive account.
+Finally, decide if you want to have the archiver ignore certain folders in your active account, and if you want the archiver to automatically delete folders that are empty.
+===== Inform us and we will implement =====
+This is a free service for Daily Data clients. Once you know what you need, or if you need help deciding that, contact us and we will schedule the initial test. Once the test is completed to your satisfaction, we will begin the initial archive process, then add your account to our automated system.