what I have: hundreds of emails in my hotmail inbox located in some hard drive property of microsoft.
what I want: Hundreds of emails in MY hard drive, in the form of hundreds of individual files in a nonproprietary format (html or txt come to mind).
I can do this manually by opening/copying/pasting/ editing/file naming each one of near thousand emails I have but it’s not an option. It’s extremely time and effort consuming and it’s boring and repetitive as hell.
I can download all the emails in my hard drive using outlook express but they would all be gathered in one (or maybe 2 or 3) large .dbx files which i can only access through outlook. not an option.
Is there any way to get what I want done? If so, how?
Use the mail client from Mozilla to down load your mail - assuming that Hotmail lets you get to your stuff via POP or IMAP.
Mozilla stores the mail in a large text file. All of the messages will be in one file. You can use the filter functions of Mozilla to seperate some of them by subject or origin or whatever. Each Mozilla folder is a seperate text file.
That doesn’t get you each mail in a seperate file, but it gets you closer and it gets you a non-proprietary format.
Gozu, Outlook Express, the free email client which comes with Internet Explorer, will allow you to access Hotmail from within it (as opposed to using the browser). The emails can just be moved to your local folders in email format (not HTML web pages). Pretty simple.
Sailor:
What does the Outlook Express file format look like? Is it a simple text file, or some kind of compressed (proprietary) format?
I ask because I don’t know (Express does NOT run under Linux, and wouldn’t have the rights to do so if it could be run under Wine) and because I am under the impression that Gozu needs to do something with it once he’s got his mail local.
It would be easier to help, though, if it was clear just what needs to be done to the stuff once it is downloaded.
Gozu is trying to download stuff from the Hotmail servers to his own computer with the object of freeing up space in his mailbox. I never keep anything in the hotmail server so that the full space is always available. I know a couple of people whose hotmail accounts often bounce my emails because they are full and I just stopped emailing them. If you want to receive emails you better make space.
At any rate, Outlook Express keeps the emails in its own files but in native format, no compression or anything as far as I know. But you can drag them to the desktop of other folder and get separate .EML files which are exactly as the email was received and which you can open with a text editor.
gotmail, baby. King gotmail. Site seems to be down now, but keep trying back.
This is a (perl) solution for unix, btw. That is to say, this will work if you use unix as a desktop, or if you have access to a unix server where you can run it as a cron job to regularly check your hotmail account and forward messages to a pop server.
I want to take my emails out of there because I am going to abandon hotmail for good. I’m fed up with it as you can see if you look up my post in the PIT.
Thanks for the “drag and drop” tip. It does almost exactly what I want. And the EML format is good enough. The only negative point is that It only displays the title of each email and not the email address it came from. But that’s not that important.
Be careful if you have several emails with the same subject line as you will have to change the file name or it will be replaced by the next one with the same name.
BTW, storing the emails in separate files under windows rather than in compact files as OE keeps them is an inefficient waste of disk space. My email OE files total 360 MB and that would grow by a lot if I kept the emails separately. Not to mention that OE allows you to search them, etc. I can’t see why I would want to do that but anyway. . . .
Outlook Express allows you to manage emails quite well. It allows folders and subfolders, it allows searches by date, words in subject line, words in message, sender, receiver, date, etc. I use it all the time. Having emails as separate files outside OE would be very inconvenient and inefficient.