How to Archive Email for the Long Term

Email is where most modern decisions are recorded, and it is the hardest record type to keep well. Mailboxes get migrated, accounts get closed when people leave, providers change, and a message that made perfect sense in its thread is meaningless on its own. Long-term email archiving comes down to three decisions: what to keep, where to keep it, and in what form.

Decide which emails are records

Keeping every message forever is not archiving; it is postponing the decision and inheriting all the personal data in the process. Most email is transitory: scheduling, acknowledgements, newsletters. The emails worth keeping are the ones that document a decision, an instruction, an agreement, a complaint, a notice or advice given. Those should be treated like any other record and kept with the matter they belong to.

A workable rule: if you would print it and put it in the file, archive it with the file. Everything else follows the mailbox's own, shorter retention.

Keep email with its context

An email filed in a personal folder called "Important" is almost as lost as one left in the inbox. The archive should hold the email next to the case, project or subject it concerns, together with its attachments. Attachments separated from their covering email lose their meaning: "see attached" with nothing attached, or a contract with no record of when and by whom it was sent. We described the wider cost of leaving this in the mailbox in the hidden cost of using email as a filing system.

Choose formats that will still open

• EML or MBOX keep the original message, headers included. Headers matter: they carry the sending server, the date and message identifiers that help prove authenticity.
• PDF or PDF/A of the rendered message is readable by anyone, without an email client, and suits long-term viewing. It loses headers unless you include them.
• Attachments kept in their own format, and converted to a durable format where the original is likely to become unreadable.

The safe practice for important messages is both: the original message file for authenticity and a rendered copy for reading. More on durable formats in file formats that will still open in 20 years.

Capture the metadata you will want later

At minimum: sender, recipients, date and time sent, subject, the matter it belongs to, and who filed it and when. If your system keeps that automatically, do not re-key it; just check it is there.

How this works in Herarx

With a mailbox connected in Herarx Mail, Add to case copies the email, its attachments and a snapshot of the message into the case's Files, and the conversation shows on the case's Mail tab. The email then lives with the matter, independent of what later happens to the mailbox, and follows the case's access rules and retention. Emails you send from a case are filed into it automatically at send time.

Plan for the mailbox to disappear

1. Before an account is closed, check which of its messages are records and file them.
2. Before a provider migration, export the records you need and verify they open.
3. Set a retention period for the archive itself, per record type, and review on schedule.
4. Test once a year: pick five archived emails at random and confirm they open, with attachments, and that you can tell what matter they belong to.