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E-mail Archiving Program
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm looking for a program that will take E-mails, save them to a set of pre-designated folders, and name them appropriately.
I work for a law firm, and I basically want the attorneys to be able to stop printing out their e-mails; however, right now, in order to do that, they have to do a "file->save as," navigate to the spot to save it in, then hand-type the subject line. This is an enormous pain in the ass with the volume of e-mail they use, which means it's about ten times easier to hit file->print and cease worrying about it. I want a program which will enable us to do a file -> save as, type in a file number, have it navigate to that case file's e-mail folder on the network, then default it to saving it in the appropriate format with the date and subject line as the file name.
Is there a program that will do this for me, or am I just fucked?
I work for a law firm, and I basically want the attorneys to be able to stop printing out their e-mails; however, right now, in order to do that, they have to do a "file->save as," navigate to the spot to save it in, then hand-type the subject line. This is an enormous pain in the ass with the volume of e-mail they use, which means it's about ten times easier to hit file->print and cease worrying about it. I want a program which will enable us to do a file -> save as, type in a file number, have it navigate to that case file's e-mail folder on the network, then default it to saving it in the appropriate format with the date and subject line as the file name.
Is there a program that will do this for me, or am I just fucked?
Thanatos on
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Looks like Outlook will let you a) Start an application b) run a script, or c) perform an action upon receiving an email or moving an email to a folder, etc.
I've never looked into an Outlook script or creating a custom action in Outlook, but you could probably start there...
Once that's done, you can back up the folders with whatever backup software you like (I'm using something called Areca).
And we don't use Lotus Notes; just WordPerfect, Office, and Outlook. XP environment, if that matters.
There should be no reason why you can't have Thunderbird/Postbox talk to the Exchange server (which does IMAP... right?). You can continue using Outlook if you want to.
This sort of thing is also a fairly simple job for a UNIX machine, so if you guys have a decent technical support guy (this is not guaranteed, by any means), he should be able to whip up a server-side thing in a day
I second this. The stuff you need to do should be possible in a Macro. Then just add a button to Outlook that calls the macro. I imagine someone with knowledge in Outlook scripting could do this in half an hour. (Note: I know nothing about outlook scripting, so this might not be true)
What's wrong with this solution, Thanatos?
I really don't have a day to spend to figure out how to do this, because IT Coordinator is one of about four hats I wear, and I have no idea how the hell Outlook scripting works.
Then again, if this saves you from printing a lot of emails then I suppose it won't take long before you'd start saving money on something like this...
http://www.techhit.com/messagesave/
If the first, you could use a program like GFI MailArchiver. Alternatively, you could just perform monthly archived backups of your mail store and retain deleted content for 120 days (at minimum, this should be set to a few days longer than your archived backup cycle.) The alternative solution may eliminate the cost of additional storage and software, but its time consuming to restore, and provides little to no searching capability against the mailboxes prior to a recovery restore.
If the latter, you could still accomplish a solution using the previous suggestion and a Public Folder store. It might require the user to move these emails to the appropriate public folder, but the retention would be covered by your archiving software or backup policy.
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And this needs to be archived and accessible both for retention and for access purposes. Obviously, storing all of these e-mails on the exchange server just isn't an option. I'm gonna check out that messagesave program when I get a chance.
MailArchiver should allow your users to access the emails. I believe it offloads emails to a SQL database, and integrates with the Outlook interface, so your users would still have access to the emails and be able to search against them. Mail Archiver supports public folders, so you can centralize those emails to a Public Folder and set up client specific subfolders.
GFI does free trials, too, so you can give it a spin and see if it suits your needs. Its approximately $30/mailbox.
We've used and liked their SpamFiltering program before switching to AppRiver filtering. Nothing against GFI, its just more appealing to clean emails before they hit your server.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
Not that I know of (I don't fully understand the question). I use something called PrimoPDF at work a whole lot (http://www.primopdf.com/) and it sort of remembers where your last PDF was saved so you can print to that same spot again.
The other thing I thought of was that in a lawyer's office there may be a requirement for having permanent hardcopy of communications (in the architect's office where I work we have to hang onto stuff for 7 or 15 years, depending) so that might be something worth looking at.
I would be concerned that you are relying on a human element to do something. When I was IT guy, I could rely on people to not do something, but expecting them to do some work was generally out of the question.
If you trust them to be diligent, then this works. If not (which is actually why I thought you had brought this up in the first place), I'd be inclined to go for the software that Dirhael mentioned.
But you know Outlook has a better way to handle this. It is called Archiving. There is even an Auto Archive function. Set it up to archive mail older than x days every y days. Set it and forget it. You'll still see it in Outlook as a separate "file" called Archive (or you can name it something else).
The archive is stored on the local machine. You can then run backup scripts to store it on a central file server (NOTE: Outlook will lock the files while it is running, so you'll have to force close Outlook to back up the files if it is running).
Also, with Outlook Rules/Filters you can automatically sort everything into folders under the Inbox, which then gets automatically set up in the archive. It's really magical, for something as beastly as Outlook.
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Then I would back it up to PST weekly/monthly/whenever. File > Import / Export allows you to save as many formats, just choose PST (also include subfolders).
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
WTF?! NO!
PSTs are notoriously unreliable, especially at excessive sizes. Its fine for certain tasks, like transfering mailbox data with EXMERGE, but you should NEVER rely on PSTs for long term storage of critical data.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
If Outlook rules allow you to start a script when the rule condition is met you could have it run a script that extracts the subject line from the message and automatically saves it in the appropriate folder. If you want to pdfize it, you could do the print to pdf thing, for which there are a ton of great freeware options. Alternatively, there is a library for Python called ReportLab, which I've used a couple times, which lets you create pdf. For straight text, its a pretty simple process of about 4 lines of setting of the pdf canvas/font info, then just feeding lines of text into the function that writes it. Of course that only works if Outlook lets you run Python scripts and you know Python.
edit: Hmm, you know, the win32com library seems to allow read/write support for pst files. I bet it would be possible to write a script that would scan the pst file at regular intervals (as long as Outlook isn't locking it) and extract any messages stored in it, convert it to pdf with attachments if necessary (apparently you can do that with pdfs!) and put in a folder based on what folder it was in in the pst file. That way your users would only have to drag their messages into the correct folder in pst file, and the script would just pull them out every night. Probably a little involved for your purposes, but that might actually be handy over where I work.
/musing.
Then us poor IT folk had to draw straws every week on who stays up til 3am moving it to 3 locations on the network (they required computers at every office even if they worked from home 99% of the time...).
They have, to this day, PST files of over 20GB each, some probably 60GB or so. They compress well and have not had any problems. The main thing is closing outlook to unlock the files for backup.
You can even later extract individual messages as .msg files from the PSTs.
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