Steven Frank wishes he hadn’t thrown away his early e-mails. I still have all of mine since late ’96, and some from ’95. Basically, I have everything from after I stopped using AOL’s client and
BlitzMail—minus the messages that were lost to Emailer’s many database crashes. Among many messages that I’ll probably never read again (like the one where I asked Metrowerks where my CodeWarrior Academic CD was), I found a few of sentimental value including the initial e-mail exchange with Danny Novo where we discussed my joining
ATPM.
All, told it’s about 9 GB in mbox format, far less than the amount of disk space I devote to MP3s. Unfortunately, most e-mail software is not designed to handle large amounts of mail. Entourage’s single database has a strict size limit. I used to keep my archives in Mailsmith, but it gets too slow with lots of mail, bloats the file sizes with its database indexes, and doesn’t let me “disconnect” less frequently used mailboxes when I synchronize with my iBook’s small hard drive. So the bulk of my archives are handled by Eudora, whose great speed encourages me to put up with its weird interface.
