EMail - A modern necessity that is evolving. Part 1 - Overview
by Keith Birchfield

EMail has become a crucial and integrated part of our every day lives. This is one of those obvious statements that holds an important and sometimes overlooked truth. We simply can not do without the means of keeping track of the myriad details in our complex and increasingly fast life styles. Email gives us one flexible tool to support this need, but just using it is no longer enough. Now we also have to worry about our growing history of content, and being able to find and use the hidden and potentially lost detail in our electronic archives.

This changes the traditional question of: "How do I communicate with efficiency and detail?" to "How do I integrate long term information in to my life?".

There are three related things to consider when answering this question:

• Backup
  • It is critical that you do not loose any part of your ideas and efforts. It is critical that you do not loose communications with your business partners. It is critical that you do not loose information or detail.
• Availability
  • It is critical that no matter where you are, that you can always access your email.
• Compatibility
  • It is critical that no matter what tool you use in the future, that you can still find any piece of your recorded life and business.

Backup:

• You should never rely on a single method of backup. Redundancy is a major key to disaster recovery, so be sure to consider this in your backup strategy.
  Make sure that you compliment you system backup with focused Email backup too!
  1. Consider storing the email content to a database. This provides flexible and powerful 'data mining'
  2. Consider storing each email as individual email files. This prevents worries about 'single point of failure'.

Availability:

• You should want to make sure that you can always access your email, whether on the road, at work or at home. And don't put all your email 'in one basket'!
  Make sure that you put your email where you can get to it! But be safe when doing it! Put it in your email client ... AND ... online!
  • Consider using filters to forward a copy of your email to an online provider.
  • Consider using aliases with forwarders to both your regular address and an online address.

Compatibility:

• Things keep changing. So to make sure you can always read your archived mail, you should consider making sure that you have your data stored in an industry standard that is not likely to change!
  • Consider converting emails stored in proprietary email formats to the industry standard EML format .

In conclusion:

• You don't want to loose your email, so back it up!
• You want to be able to get to your email, so make it available!
• You want to always be able to read your emails, so make it compatible!

About the Author

Keith Birchfield has over 25 years of hands on experience in developing and providing systems solutions for individuals and corporate environments. Learn more by visiting http://BitDaddys.com