What are the tradeoffs between the various email archiving approaches?

Specifically, as email archives continue to grow quickly, are organizations finding that conventional archiving of files in Personal Storage Table (PST) or Notes Storage Format (NSF) working at the organizational level working? Or is there a need for more policy-based approaches due to the way that individuals rely on their personal email archives?

MGallinger

digital-preservation
digital-archiving
email

Comments

jonsca: Could you edit the question a bit to relate this to libraries directly? As of now, it's leaning towards being off-topic.
Jakob: See also the related question on archiving mailing lists
Jakob: The Wikipedia article Electronic message journaling might help to rethink the question and modify it to become more specific. Right now it's a very broad question so no concrete answer is possible.
anarchivist: What do you mean by "archiving"? Are you talking about long-term preservation that is ultimately access driven?
Joe: Why would you archive anything other than mbox? (although, you need to document how you escape '^From' lines)

Answer by waingram

For anyone serious about preserving e-mail, and by that I mean more than just saving the files, one must migrate them to a format that will be accessible in the future. The de facto standards for preserving e-mail messages (and attachments) are MBOX and EML.

There are several tools for migrating PST and NSF files to a more preservable standard. These include commercial tools like Aid4Mail, and open source solutions like EMCAP from the NC State Archives.

Preserving attachments is much more difficult, for obvious reasons.

I would suggest reading Christopher Prom's excellent report, "Preserving Email." DPC Technology Watch Report 11–01 December 2011. doi:10.7207/twr11-01 Much of what is written above came from Prom's article.