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EML versus PST in e-mail programs
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Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 4, 2011 at 11:00 AM
I know this is a little off topic, but I’d like to tap the intellects (excuse the upcoming pun!) of the OutlinerSoftware readers concerning e-mail formats.
After Stephen’s mention of Intellect I’ve started testing it again (I used to be an avid Time and Chaos user many years ago). I see that some of the irritants that used to bug me then are still in there (e.g. creation of all recurring tasks at one time rather than when previous occurrence is done, also meaning that all recurring tasks have to have an end date; no undated tasks allowed etc.). But one if its greatest features is the ability to run on a USB stick, which could be a great boon.
Outlook uses .pst files and Intellect .eml files to store its e-mails. A couple of questions which I can’t find answers to elsewhere:
- does using thousands of separate .eml files (one for each e-mail) make a program using them faster or slower than a program (i.e. Outlook) using a single (large) .pst file?
- what are the security implications of using .eml files? I.e. I imagine that if my computer was hacked into people could open the .pst file or the .eml files to read their contents, but my gut feeling is that the .pst file is better protected. Is that a correct assumption?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Graham
Posted by Franz Grieser
Aug 4, 2011 at 12:07 PM
Hi Graham
>- does using thousands of separate .eml files (one for each
>e-mail) make a program using them faster or slower than a program (i.e. Outlook) using
>a single (large) .pst file?
That depends on the implementation.
>- what are the security implications of using .eml files?
>I.e. I imagine that if my computer was hacked into people could open the .pst file or the
>.eml files to read their contents, but my gut feeling is that the .pst file is better
>protected. Is that a correct assumption?
Sorry: No. Data in a PST file is not encrypted. It’s not plain text either. But you can easily get software that opens PST files and lets you read or extract data.
From a security point of view, however, I’d find a collection of thousands of files (1 per email) preferable to one single file containing all your data (emails, tasks, contacts, ...). If the PST file gets corrupted, you may lose all the data in it, if one EML file gets corrupted, you lose that one email. There are, however, 3 or 4 excellent rescue tools that can be used to repair PST files or extract data.
Franz
Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 4, 2011 at 05:59 PM
Thanks Franz,
This leaves me in a bit of a quandary (not unusual when I have too little to do (or no mind to do what I do need to do) and CRIMP takes over).
My Outlook pst files (current and archive) are together 8 GB and, even if they weren’t slowing Outlook down, they are causing disk space issues on my lap top.
I don’t want to lose any historical data, but I realize I could archive older e-mails by converting them to .eml files (though I understand this detaches any attachments?) and store them elsewhere, with the added advantage that .eml files can be indexed and searched by programs such as Google Desktop, so I could still locate old texts.
Does anybody have any experience with archiving old e-mail data? Any pitfalls I should be aware of?
Graham
Posted by Franz Grieser
Aug 4, 2011 at 06:12 PM
Graham.
Why don’t you use the AutoArchive feature in Outlook to move old e-mails to an archive PST file? You can open the archive in Outlook any time you need to refer to an old e-mail.
AutoArchiving reduces the size of your PST file making it easier to handle - for Outlook and for you when backing up your e-mails.
Before AutoArchiving I would go through the e-mails - in particular the e-mails I sent - and delete the files I attached (these are usually files that are also stored in the file system because for sending them I had to save them on my hard disk). This usually saves a lot of disk space :-)
Franz
Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 4, 2011 at 06:31 PM
Franz,
I do that already - the archive.pst is 6 GB, current e-mails the other 2 GB. For various networking reasons the archive is also on the lap top, which causes disk space issues.
I’m just brainstorming really - wondering if there’s a better way, as e-mails tend to be isolated away from other information that needs managing. Programs like Everdesk (which on my systems just explodes when it tries to import the hundreds of thousands of e-mails I have stored) tries to resolve this (by associating individual e-mails with the file system), as does Chaos Intellect (by associating e-mails with contact names) ....
In my set up it’s more of a problem because e-mail is away from my main PC - so I was cogitating if at least the archive might usefully be dumped there (and be searchable ...)
Graham