4 ms·

No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on

by liotier 12y ago

No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?

johnchristopher 12y ago
Tongue in cheeck: paper is.
walterbell 12y ago
Thanks, Jon Postel, http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/awards/postel-service-award/ten-year-tribute-jon-postel http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/...
out_of_protocol 12y ago
To my list of quotes. Actually, like 50 years, way before internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin
drfritznunkie 12y ago
Whitfield Diffie (yes, of Diffie-Hellman), just posted to the IP list an email he pulled up from 1976(!) in response to a crappy article about VA Shiva Ayyadura "inventing" email. I'm sure he's got even older emails, but the fact that he had it, was able to easily find it, and then resend it with a descendant of itself 38 years later is pretty amazing to me! " A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format: 29-SEP-76 1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT From: CERF at USC-ISI Subject: Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 To: walker cc: cerf, wd at SU-AI 22-AUG-76 0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER To: DIFFIE at SU-AI so I don't see how this can be novel in 1978. Whit "
ibisum 12y ago
True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of the 90's, the Mail.app sql-database of the 21st Century, and so on. It has persisted, dear mail-format, but oh what a mess it still is after all these years. I'd kill for a solution that just gives me my own full-text search engine to query/manipulate this archive, without first having to configure stream-plugins to do text conversions and so on. I guess this is one of those cases where I should just set up a dedicated Linux machine (finally, a use for an rPi!) with all the years mails, and promptly set a text search tool on the problem .. trouble is, can I do that without having to train the thing to handle SMTP headers first? Intuitively I'd say "probably this is a done deal out there somewhere" but a part of me still cowers at the idea .. (And before anyone mentions it: no, google is not my solution. I want to do offline manipulation of decades of mail archives .. not just turn it over to some Entity, Inc. to solve..)
- ghaff 12y ago
  And the reality is that there's a vanishingly small percentage of that archived email that is of any use to you or anyone else. I don't have anything before about 2001 for reasons of isolated proprietary mail systems (e.g. minicomputer-based), disk failures, or just not making the effort to archive. I do have about the next 10 years saved but it's sitting in Outlook on a retired Windows system I keep around for such purposes--but there's no easy way AFAIK to translate it to another format and it's not something I'm inspired to devote great energy to.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Mozilla had a pretty decent Outlook converter for a while. The other way to convert it was to forward it to another system. Among the reasons I've vastly preferred Maildir / mbox mail formats (even allowing for mbox's brokenness).
- rakoo 12y ago

by liotier 12y ago

johnchristopher 12y ago

Tongue in cheeck: paper is.

walterbell 12y ago

Thanks, Jon Postel, http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/awards/postel-service-award/ten-year-tribute-jon-postel http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/...

out_of_protocol 12y ago

To my list of quotes. Actually, like 50 years, way before internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin

drfritznunkie 12y ago

Whitfield Diffie (yes, of Diffie-Hellman), just posted to the IP list an email he pulled up from 1976(!) in response to a crappy article about VA Shiva Ayyadura "inventing" email. I'm sure he's got even older emails, but the fact that he had it, was able to easily find it, and then resend it with a descendant of itself 38 years later is pretty amazing to me! " A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format: 29-SEP-76 1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT From: CERF at USC-ISI Subject: Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 To: walker cc: cerf, wd at SU-AI 22-AUG-76 0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER To: DIFFIE at SU-AI so I don't see how this can be novel in 1978. Whit "

ibisum 12y ago

True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of the 90's, the Mail.app sql-database of the 21st Century, and so on. It has persisted, dear mail-format, but oh what a mess it still is after all these years. I'd kill for a solution that just gives me my own full-text search engine to query/manipulate this archive, without first having to configure stream-plugins to do text conversions and so on. I guess this is one of those cases where I should just set up a dedicated Linux machine (finally, a use for an rPi!) with all the years mails, and promptly set a text search tool on the problem .. trouble is, can I do that without having to train the thing to handle SMTP headers first? Intuitively I'd say "probably this is a done deal out there somewhere" but a part of me still cowers at the idea .. (And before anyone mentions it: no, google is not my solution. I want to do offline manipulation of decades of mail archives .. not just turn it over to some Entity, Inc. to solve..)

ghaff 12y ago
And the reality is that there's a vanishingly small percentage of that archived email that is of any use to you or anyone else. I don't have anything before about 2001 for reasons of isolated proprietary mail systems (e.g. minicomputer-based), disk failures, or just not making the effort to archive. I do have about the next 10 years saved but it's sitting in Outlook on a retired Windows system I keep around for such purposes--but there's no easy way AFAIK to translate it to another format and it's not something I'm inspired to devote great energy to.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Mozilla had a pretty decent Outlook converter for a while. The other way to convert it was to forward it to another system. Among the reasons I've vastly preferred Maildir / mbox mail formats (even allowing for mbox's brokenness).
rakoo 12y ago