Is emulation a good option for preserving large email collections?

What are the pros and cons, if the collection is from one person and contains many attachments in various formats?

Bill Lefurgy

computer-emulation

Comments

Ben Fino-Radin: Sorry Bill, but as it stands the question is rather abstract. There are too many variables. What is the nature of the material? Who needs access to it? What format is it in? There are plenty of places (NZ Visual Rendering Matters report to name one) to point people asking the above question, but biven the goal of this SE being a problem solving expert community, I don't think pondering emulation at face value is of much value.

Answer by mjuarez

Preservation of software, as opposed to digital media, is an entirely different ball of wax. Part of it may be driven by the need to view stored media that only a specific application or operating system can understand. But, you could argue it would be useful to preserve the application, platform or operating system, just for historical reasons.

You could argue that abandonware fits this case. There are people who want to retain the ability to play old games, and sometimes run old applications, but usually companies do not sell the game anymore, and/or don't support them with newer operating systems. This brings with it entirely different concerns around legality of distributing old software, even if it's not commercially available anymore . While some companies have gone out of business, the IP usually still belongs to somebody out there,

You might also ask yourself, if it's worth it to actually keep old software around in a runnable state. Why would you want to run WordStar 4.0 these days, for example? Maybe if you're really nostalgic about old word processors, but otherwise, probably only of interest to a computer museum. Any data that could have been useful in those old platforms and/or applications has probably already been migrated to newer platforms, so there is no need to keep the old software around.