I’ve not been posting much at all this weekend because I’ve been busy instead packing up my offices for the move to Phoenix. It’s amazing how much paper and how many books one can accumulate over the course of a couple of decades.

I’m actually able to dump most of my paper files though and that’s helping a ton. I’ve already scanned my critical paper documents into PDF’s and stored them on various hard-drives. And most of the paperwork and documents that I’ve had to manage over the past few years have come in the form of email and emailed attachments so they’re really all set to go.

Many of the “church” documents have been saved on the parish IMAP mail server and I won’t have access to that anymore. So after doing a little research I came across a program mentioned on Hawkwings that will take all my mail, mush it into a giant database and let me take it all with me as an archive…

“MailSteward will archive all of your email in a database for easy retrieval. Click on the Archive Email button and MailSteward will go to work storing copies of all your email text, HTML, attachments, and raw source, into a relational database file. MailSteward has a wealth of features for importing, tagging, saving, and exporting, including the ability to export your vital email information to a number of standard data formats. “

I’ve got no commercial relationship with MailSteward at all. I’m just delighted that it took 38,685 emails that I had on the parish server and archived them into a database that’s about 1 Gb in size without any problems or warning flags at all in about 3 hours of run-time. (That’s roughly 8 years of saved emails – though to be honest I didn’t get serious about saving my mail until I starting working with some uber-technology folks four or so years ago.

More info about MailSteward here: MailSteward