Number 295 - December 2007

A Novel Way of Archiving MSN Email
by Carl Tenning, Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers
MSN Mail has a utility for backing up e-mail by first placing a check mark on the e-mails you want to save, then clicking on "File" > "Copy E-mail". This creates a file with the extension "msnbak". However, this file cannot be opened by Windows. It's only purpose is to transport the e-mail to another computer, where it can then be imported by the MSN Wizard into MSN Mail. This process can also be accomplished from the "Help & Settings" > "E-mail settings" > "Import or export e-mail , copy e-mail, or import contacts". Using this method as an archive can be extremely tedious to extract a single e-mail since you can't view the dot-msnbak file directly.    MSN Mail, of course, stores e-mail in convenient folders, but I find that after I've accumulated thousands of e-mails in these folders, MSN Mail seems to slow down, or at least go into some kind of housekeeping mode at times. Since most of these e-mails are never accessed again, I would like to save them somewhere else, but still have an easy way of finding them again.    Gmail, because it offers such tremendous capacity, makes an excellent archive. What I do in MSN Mail is to select all e-mails within a given folder and click on "Forward". I then forward them to my Gmail account. They are actually forwarded as a single e-mail with attachments. Each individual e-mail is a separate attachment with the extension ".email" and each attachment is listed with the title of it's original e-mail. This makes it very convenient to find and open an individual e-mail. At this point I have my archive in a form I can visually scan for an individual e-mail and view it individually. Gmail has two methods of opening the attachment, (1) view as text, and	(2) download. Clicking on "View as Text" displays just the raw text of the message and does not include it's own attachments. Clicking on "Download" actually downloads the e-mail complete with its original attachments. It can then be opened directly in the MSN browser or saved to the hard drive with the ".email" extension which can be opened by double clicking.    You can even download the emails back to your own computer, find an e-mail subject, and open them individually. Here's how:    (1) In Gmail, open the original e-mail transmitted to Gmail. The Gmail then lists all the attachments.    (2) Click on "Download all attachments".    (3) Gmail downloads them as a ZIP file.    (4) Save the ZIP file to a folder your computer    (5) Unzip the file and you have each individual e-mail as a ".email" file.    (6) Double click on a ".email" file and it opens with MSN Mail.
Number 295 - December 2007