I assume she was using Outlook and probably Exchange.  Does anyone using Outlook really expect to be able to reliably have access to their old email very long?  I think "those people" are idiots...  I'd guess that Outlook / Exchange versioning issues, curruption, periodic rebuilds / restarts, and general Windows / Microsoft related confusion led periodic lossage that is just the cost of using such technology.

I have a continuous archive of email spanning more than 20 years, and something like 25-30GB, online and always accessible to me.  And with numerous backups, all easy to make and restore.  And all using mbox format, around since essentially the beginning of email, which is resilient to corruption, truncation, etc.

In multiple cases, at multiple companies, people have needed access to old email and documents which I had but were long ago lost to everyone else (who mostly used Outlook).  In one case, it allowed a new contract worth probably more than a million or two.

Email is my most reliable source of stored and organized knowledge.  I've been hard at work, in my fragmented spare time, working on a true knowledgebase app / interchange format / distributed security system.  (The key problem really is a much better user interface paradigm.)  You can bet there will be a couple ways to represent and archive it that is as resilient as mbox.

Stephen

On 6/15/14, 8:05 AM, Henry Rivera wrote: