Does size really matter....??

[Gino]

Okay…. calling all you computer gurus and your mind-boggling methods of solving dumb computer problems caused by user stoopidness.

Not being a good organizer with computer files and stuff, I’ve left my e-mails become overwhelmingly horrid. Now, I keep a lot of e-mails in all kinds of folders and the vast majority of them have pictures attached… duh we’re a sign shop. Therefore, I save the pictures to the customer’s folder on the server, but they’re still in my e-mail folders causing a huge dinosaur tail effect inside. I like to keep all of this stuff close to me, so I can refer back to stuff, but my hard-drive is becoming near full due to many of these pictures. Is there a program, service, or some type of procedure where I can keep my e-mails in tact and still not clog up my hard-drive ?? I’ve been told, if I get a larger hard-drive, it will happen soon enough when the program just won’t handle several thousands of e-mails with all the attachments.

Hope I’m making sense. Remember, I don’t come from a computer background. I can get around in my programs, just not the computer persay.

If you need more information, just ask away. I’m being told I’ll have to probably soon just annihilate my entire e-mail section and start over. Say this isn’t so…… please, even if it is true, tell me so I go home feeling good tonight and save the bad news for tomorrow morning. Heck, I even suggested getting another computer just dedicated to e-mails and he said, that won’t work, even the e-mail accounts have certain limits after a while.

in advance............. Gino

​

 

[signage]

quit being a pack rat Gino!

 

[randya]

What program or service are you using for email.
Outlook will allow you to export and save whereever you want.
All or individual folders.

 

[Gino]

Thunderbird.

 

[letterman7]

Go get a 2TB drive at Staples for $80 bucks and move the folders to there. Setup your email program to save to that drive.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

What program or service are you using for email.
Outlook will allow you to export and save whereever you want.
All or individual folders.

I was actually going to suggest using the PDF Maker, if you have Acrobat Pro, and back things up in PDF files and archive it somewhere. All indexed and searchable. Only bad thing is that as of yet this doesn't work to the same degree of success with Thunderbird. I would like to go to Thunderbird, but this one process is keeping me with outlook.

 

[SolitaryT]

We usually download all the attachments into the appropriate customer file and then delete emails after a while. Of course, we use a gmail account (you can set them up for businesses with your doman... ours is info@alaskasignpro.com), so everything we have in our inbox (currently 2,096 emails) is on "the cloud" and doesn't interfere with our computing.

 

[ChicagoGraphics]

A File Horder, lol

Couldn't you just get an external hard drive and save it to that. It's pretty much what I did when my C drive filled up with work files that I won't get rid of.

You can alway's check into that Mossey Online storage, I'm not sure it will do what you want to do.

 

[visual800]

if you have utilized the pics in the emails from your email to your hard drive why save emails? I can understand if it an urgent matter to save a few but if you have used them in your software do you really need them in your email?

 

[Mike F]

if you have utilized the pics in the emails from your email to your hard drive why save emails? I can understand if it an urgent matter to save a few but if you have used them in your software do you really need them in your email?

Those e-mails could contain job specs or other information he might need to reference at a later date. One of the first things I was taught here was to save ALL correspondence with a customer, in case a "he said, she said" issue comes up.

+1 on archiving everything as indexed and searchable PDFs. Probably the best way to go if you want to keep everything.

 

[Justin]

yulp... searchable pdf's..

 

[SightLine]

Semi off topic - I upgraded our main server a few weeks ago from Windows Server 2003R2 with Exchange 2003 to Server 2008R2 with Exchange 2010. Entire weekend project but I got a close look at the email database. Overall about 9GB for 5 users. 6GB of it is my mailbox store alone.... having an internal server does make keeping thing forever much easier though as long as the server has plenty of free space.

 

[choucove]

First off, what kind of computer are you currently using? What operating system, and what email software are you cataloging all your emails with? The most common ones are Microsoft Outlook and on some older computer, Outlook Express.

In a round about way, I actually addressed this issue with a couple customers last week. The way that many email clients out there work is to save all of the emails, attachments, calendar events, contacts, etc. into one large database file or a collection of files. In Microsoft Outlook this is the .PST file. Of course, the more emails you have saved the bigger this database file becomes. Each time that you open up Outlook and have it running, your computer is having to access and process this increasingly large database file, which can cause your entire computer system to respond slower and slower and increases the likelihood of having some form of random error which can corrupt or even destroy that underlying .PST file.

Basically, once a .pst file gets larger than about 3GB in size, Microsoft Outlook has a very difficult time working with the file properly and can cause it to freeze up or even crash. This is especially true for people running older or lower performance computers.

The simple solution for a lot of people is basically to move to an entirely new .PST file while keeping the old original one as a backup. You can even open up multiple .pst data files within Outlook and have your main data file be the smaller, newer data file, but have access to view the original archived one in the event you need to look up older emails and information. However, this still doesn't completely solve the issue of performance in Outlook because the program is still having to open up that large archive data folder to manage when you open and work with the program.

While it may take some time, and may not be your ideal solution, in the end the most efficient use of resources and space for you may be to just pick a specific time (say, December 31, 2007) and delete any emails older than that point in your files unless they have some very specific and important relevance still. This is what we ended up doing for one of the customers having issues, and we cut his .PST file from just over 4.5 GB in size to under 2 GB, performed a check and repair of the PST database file, and the random application freezing he was experiencing went away.

 

[Mosh]

All our e-mails are saved in the cloud, saved us about 3 months ago with a system wide wipe.MSN based e-mail, 15 years + worth of stuff...no cost.

 

[round man]

I use yahoo mail,..I have all my files there for the last ten years or so,..including the attachments,...I've had half a dozen machines crash die and burn on me in that time and haven't lost one file,....besides I can access them from anywhere and with any smartphone,....and they don't slow up my machine,...and I have all the attachments and pics and such there to back up any I might delete once I download them and start messing around with them to output,....

edited to add,...if an email is infected with a virus its on yahoo's server and not downloaded to my machine like it would be if I used outlook or thunderbird as they download the mail as soon as you open the program up, and then the infected mail is already on your hard drive doing its dance,....and also they filter out the junk mail for me ,....

I also keep an account at gmail which catches all the email from my other two email accounts and stores them as a backup in case yahoo ever looses them,...I only use that account as a redundant backup as it get all the mail from all three acct.s and stores them

 

[binki]

if you are using outlook you can archive the emails over a certain age and then back up the file that is created for the archive.

we use carbonite for backup and keep all of our files on a central computer.

 

[ruckusman]

Don't want to come off to harsh - but if that information is important enough for you to keep, then it's imperative that you get it onto something that isn't a hard drive!
It can be a single CD/DVD/Blu Ray disc depending on the file sizes, or a tape drive.

For memory thunderbird stores data in Documents and settings > "User Name" > Appplication Data > Mozilla > Thunderbird > Profiles > "Profile name" > mail or folders. The within that folder you will find files with the same names as your current folders.
Keep this info for further down...

Now what you can do is, in thunderbird, create a new folder on the same level as the inbox, sent trash etc folders. Call it archive.
Then recreate your current folder structure(s) within this folder.
Figure out how recent a message needs to be, for it to be immediately retrievable - a month, 3 months, 6 months
For everything older, put it into the relevant archive folder. The better you sort things at this point, the simpler it will be to retrieve mail later, just use what works for you.

Now with thinderbird closed write copies of the files within the archive folder within the mail data folder I pointed you to earlier. Do 2 copies, minimum, label them both by date and put one in your work desk drawer, take the other home.

Several people have asked me recently about memory sticks, been shooting digital for over a decade and never lost an image on a memory card, but I never trust them for storage any longer than necessary.
Yes CD's and DVD's can lose data, choose decent quality ones.

Once you've got your two copies, you can re-open thunderbird and delete the archive contents and subfolders.

If you need to retrieve mail, you can copy the files from the CD/DVD back into the thunderbird mail folder > archive folder, then they will re-appear next time you open thunderbird.

For searching, you can use windows search to find text within files. This is do-able on the monolithic database files that thunderbird uses to store messages if yo are uncertain as to which file to reload.

hope this helps

peace out

 

[ruckusman]

BTW I should mention that there is a phenomenon called infant mortality with new hard drives. So never just assume that your new drive is safe. Warranty will cover replacement of the drive, say bye bye data or bye bye $$ to get it back if the drive failure is serious.

 

[Locals Find!]

Gino, get a gmail account and set it up to handle your pop3 accounts. Then backup your thunderbird and stop using it to check your pop3 emails.

With Gmail if you hit the storage limit you can buy additional email storage for a few dollars a year. I just upgraded mine and it was only like $5.00 for twice the space I had. Then you will know your emails and your files are safe.

Very simple solution. Gmail is so easy I have taught 80 year old Realtors that hardly know how to turn on a computer how to use it. Your smart you would have know problem learning it inside of an afternoon. Then you can store all you want and have it searchable till the day you retire and beyond.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

edited to add,...if an email is infected with a virus its on yahoo's server and not downloaded to my machine like it would be if I used outlook or thunderbird as they download the mail as soon as you open the program up,

You can go through options and tell it not to download as soon as you open it up(unless you are using an older copy that doesn't have that option or they took it out of newer ones (I'm on 2007 Outlook). You can also tell either one of them to leave the mail on the server, so it is still on the web-based one if you like to use that route.

and then the infected mail is already on your hard drive doing its dance,....and also they filter out the junk mail for me ,....

You can keep the Yahoo email filter and then you have the outlook(thunderbird) coupled with your anti-virus to filter it yet again as well. Only down side is that you have to check your spam to make sure something that got in there that wasn't supposed to. I have yahoo spam turned off, so it's only outlook with Kaspersky and Malwarebytes that looks at everything.

If you need to retrieve mail, you can copy the files from the CD/DVD back into the thunderbird mail folder > archive folder, then they will re-appear next time you open thunderbird.

For searching, you can use windows search to find text within files. This is do-able on the monolithic database files that thunderbird uses to store messages if yo are uncertain as to which file to reload.

The routes with Thunderbird just isn't as easy, simple, and as far as I'm concerned haven't yielded the best results compared to use the Acrobat plugin for outlook (PDF Maker) and creating PDFs. You can have one PDF file that covers a month, totally indexed and searchable

I do agree with the need to find a separate storage medium. Especially if your program file is on an SSD, like mine. More then likely it is also storing those emails on the SSD, which means that if that drive fails, to my knowledge you don't have a chance of getting it back compared to mechanical drives.

BTW I should mention that there is a phenomenon called infant mortality with new hard drives. So never just assume that your new drive is safe. Warranty will cover replacement of the drive, say bye bye data or bye bye $$ to get it back if the drive failure is serious.

Yep. They either crap out on you within the first few months or they last your a few years.

 

[Justin]

I personally just create a folder for each customer, and then print the emails to PDF. You just have to ensure to print the attachment to PDF also, or save the attachment as jpeg, and then combine the pdf's into one in order of date of emails. This will take a lot of time my way if you have tons of old customers, and such but I am pretty new so just getting started.

You can do it your own way, but to get emails to pdf just print to pdf.